USC’s digital imaging director Matt Gainer, with assistant Giao Luong: “[After digitizing], an entire lost world opens up before your eyes.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Issue: Winter 2005

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing

Digital Archiving

Matt Gainer was an MFA student in studio art when he started digitizing the library’s Special Collections in 1996. “Back then, USC wasn’t on the cutting edge of archival photo digitization,” Gainer says “It was on the bleeding edge.”

In a fruitful collaboration with USC librarian Wayne Shoaf, a metadata specialist now in charge of upgrading the library’s electronic cataloging capabilities, Gainer began one of USC’s first digital archiving projects – to make publicly accessible the roughly 23,000 images of the California Historical Society collection, a visual treasure trove documenting Southland history from the 1860s to the 1930s.

USC had accepted the collection from CHS on a long-term, renewable loan in 1990. It was a good early candidate for digitization, as 14,000 of its metadata records – containing detailed information about each photograph – had already been created by historical society volunteers and USC students.

“We wanted to digitize the images to protect the delicate glass negatives from too much handling,” says Shoaf. “There was also the huge challenge of digitizing so many images. Could we do it? Nobody knew if this could be done on such a large scale.”

Gainer rigged up a Hasselblad camera – the same kind used by astronauts on the moon – with a digital scanning unit instead of film, and aimed it at vintage silver-nitrate-coated glass negatives, illuminated from below by a light box. The results were vivid, high-resolution images as large as 7,000 by 7,000 pixels. Unfortunately, it took ages for the contraption to grab a single image, and each resulting computer file weighed in at 25 megabytes or more – a significant storage burden back then.

“I’d create roughly 70 images per day,” says Gainer. “Since hard-drives were much smaller and more expensive in 1996, several hours a day were spent moving data from local machines to remote servers for archiving” – a process that takes minutes today.

Luckily for Gainer, the technology supporting such work improved rapidly. Soon an image could be captured in just a couple of minutes using a flatbed scanner. This greatly sped up the digitizing process, but it also caused Shoaf and his team of student metadata specialists to fall farther and farther behind.

“It seldom took longer than five minutes to digitize an image, but it often took 10 minutes to create a metadata record,” Says Shoaf. “We needed two metadata people for each digitizer just to keep up.”

Today, the Hasselblad resides in a safe – not quite obsolete, but fading fast. In 2004, they replaced it with a 4-by-5 scanner that gets such high resolution that only a few existing lenses can take full advantage of it.

A second “capture station” picks up the 4-by-5’s slack. It consists of a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II mounted over a “cradle” that can hold fragile monographs in a firm but tender clasp. The Canon can’t handle oversized images such as maps, but it’s great for books. On a July afternoon, the cradle snuggles a volume of colorful butterfly illustrations from USC’s Hancock Collection.

From a nearby computer station, one operator controls the camera, checking focus and firing when ready, while a cotton-gloved worker gingerly turns pages. (“It’s really important that we don’t send stuff out in worse shape than it came in,” explains Gainer.) Upstairs, more workers operate a bank of professional-quality flatbed scanners. Here, the California Historical Society’s less-fragile photo prints as well as the Los Angeles Examiner collection’s photo negatives are undergoing digitization.

As of last summer, 23,526 images in the California Historical Society collection had been scanned and cataloged. That includes all the glass plates plus some 5,000 nitrite-film negatives long held in cold storage at the Huntington Library.

What’s been gained?

“Huge amounts of information can be recovered from the digital images of these old glass plates,” says Gainer. “You can read street signs near the vanishing point in many urban shots and even make out what kind of fashions are in shop windows. An entire lost world opens up before your eyes.”

– Kevin Durkin and Diane Krieger