Re: Original digital photog standards?

[Robert Coldwell]

On Jan 25, 2006, at 2:31 PM, Marisa Ramirez wrote: I?m looking for best practices/ standards for original digital photography. We have an agency looking to use digital cameras to capture images that will have a permanent retention period. Their records officer was looking for guidance from us as to requirements for permanent digital photographs (including aerial photography) that may end up in our Archives. I want to be able to come back to them with camera specifications and file format specs that will guide their camera purchasing decision and digital file processing. As far as the camera goes you'll want to have the best quality dependent upon the usage. CCD based cameras will be sharper than CMOS cameras. Medium format based digital cameras can give you the best quality, but they are not very portable, so there are trade-offs. If you want to do lots of quick, reasonably good quality images in a very portable system then a 35mm digital SLR is best. For more controlled image acquisition at a higher quality then medium format based digital cameras are best. Many interesting portable digital backs are now available, so really the only drawback is their weight. An example of the quality of these cameras can be seen here: http://camera.digitalguitararchive.com Please note that this system is still available. For file formats uncompressed TIF is generally the best way to go as it has been a standard for a long time so it is well-supported by equipment and software. File sizes become an issue as your digital collection becomes larger. TIF supports different compressions, but you may possibly run into some compatibility issues in the future. JPEG2000 is probably the best all around file format for archiving, but it is only slowly becoming widely used. A lossless JPEG2000 file can be around 25% the size of an uncompressed TIF. It supports some interesting access methods embedded metadata. The ALA conference last year had some interesting talks about the format. I'm very certain it will come into more use in digital library archives over the next few years. TIF can always be converted to something else later, so I would suggest that for current projects. We currently have scanned image guidelines, but that isn?t very helpful in their case. Any ideas? Thanks, Marisa =================================================== Marisa Ramirez, Digital Repository Coordinator mrami...@lib.az.us Phone 602.364.0264 / 800.228.4710 FAX 602.542.4972 Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records 1700 W. Washington, Ste 300 Phoenix, 85007 http://www.lib.az.us -------------------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: archiv...@digitalguitararchive.com To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-546951...@listserver.americaneagle.com ------ Robert Coldwell www.DigitalGuitarArchive.com --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com