Las Colinas Women's Association collection, Oral History and Photo Digitization project

The six boxes of the Las Colinas Women's Association
collection
Photo by A. Blythe, 2018

Thursday, June 28

This was my sixth day working at the Irving Archives and I started working with the Las Colinas Women's Association collection.  I finished examining the remaining files in the sixth box and recorded the contents on my finding aid rough draft.  Once I was finished with that I spoke with Kevin about what to do next.  Kevin explained that the next step to to combine boxes, files and put papers from binders into file folders.  I decided to work with the first three boxes and ended up emptying one of the boxes.  I asked Kevin about the ascension number of that particular box and he told me that I would still list it on the finding aid.  I combined the box with one scrapbook and folder into the first box containing scrapbooks.  I kept the scrapbooks in annual order and the two CDs of the Las Colinas Women's Association 2011 Slide Show that were discovered in the second box, were put with the scrapbooks of the 2000s.  I created a another rough draft once I started combining materials into the various boxes.  Once I was finished with the three boxes, I started working on the Oral History Project.

I had not finished transcribing Mary Morton's interview therefore I continued working on it.  Kevin showed me some of the pictures of the people that I had transcribed their interviews.  many of the photos were in very good condition.

Kevin asked me if I wanted to learn about the Photo Digitization project that Kevin and Chris were working on.  I told him I would like to and we proceeded to work with some old photos that were given to the Archives.  The scanner that was used is large enough to scan several photos at one time, however the settings were not set correctly for the photos.  Kevin went over the various settings in the program, I had noticed that the format that the pictures are scanned is in TIF not JPEG.  I inquired about that and Kevin replied that the TIF format is the most like the original picture, in other words there is no image data lost after scanning.  The JPEG format compression disgards some of the image data and if copies are made then the JPEG image will continue to lose some of the image data.  I inquired if many people requested copies of the photos and Kevin told me that they use to have a stack of glossy photo paper for people who wanted copies of the pictures.  Now days, many people request a digital copy of the photo instead of a print out.

This lead to another inquiry as I thought back to a discussion in a class about storing digital photos, I inquired about the storage of the digital photos once they were scanned into the computer.  Kevin stated that the photos were stored on the computer's hard drive, then stored in the cloud and stored on a flash drive.  Since the Irving Archives is small, I was not too surprised that there wasn't more storage for digital photos.  The collection that we were scanning had pictures and papers, but we made a wonderful discovery within the collection.  We found about six or seven tintype photos.  They were in very good condition but Kevin did not want to scan them until he did some research on them on how to digitize them.

Another aspect that I inquired about was the naming of the pictures, since some of the pictures were labeled while some were not.  Kevin stated the we put the information as the titles of the photos, the date of the photo and the collection number.  We got several photos done and for the fun of it we used Photoshop to fix one of the photos that was torn.  We did that until the end of the day and found the photos and papers very fascinating.