The Digitization Project

In 2000, the Paul Evans Library of Fruit Science took over the management of the Fruit Experiment Station archives. Within the archive collection orchard records, personnel logs, correspondence, and administrative records are glass photographic plates, film negatives, photographs. From 1999-2001, data from these images was loaded into a database, including the descritption written by the original photographer, the subject category either assigned by that person or other Station personnel, the date, the fruit, the Latin scientific name, location where the image was taken. and other relevant notes. In 2003, a small sample of the photographic plates were sent to a regional company to evaluate the quality of digital images produced from the plates. The images were spectacular, and the decision was made by the SMSU librarians to apply for a grant to digitized the photographic plates, and make the images available to the public via the Internet.

In early 2003, Suzanne Teghtmeyer, librarian of Evans Library, applied for a grant, called, Track I: First Steps in Digitization, a grant program offered by Office of the Secretary of State, Missouri State Library for Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grants. The initial application asked for the digitization of the plates (thumbnail-sized images, larger jpg images, and archival Tiff images), and film negatives and photographs made. The grant was approved to complete the digitization of all the images and the creation of film negatives due to the inherent fragility of the glass plates. Photographs were not funded as this was a digitization grant, not an archival grant.

In late 2003, the grant was funded and finally approved, and in early 2004 a bid contract was sent out to regional digitization/photographic services companies to outsource this work. Allied Photocolor of St. Louis received the contract, and soon after the glass plates were deliverd to their location. To create the digital images, Allied Photocolor used two flatbed scanners, a Fugi FineScan and a Kodak HR500 Scanner. A Mac G4 computer with Photoshop, Versions 9 and 10, controlled the imaging and burning of the images to CD. The negatives were made using a Durst Enlarger and Refrema Developer, with Schneider Optics software.

While the images were being digitized, Suzanne and the Missouri State University Library Systems Department coordinated on the appearance and accessiblitiy of the images via the Internet. The program MySQL was used to merge the images with information from the source database, and provide searching capability to find select images.

In the summer of 2004, the digital imaging process was completed (ahead of schedule), and final clean-up of the database began.