The End of the Road...

Well, the ensuing weeks have been filled with scanning and tagging as many photos as possible and still the boxes of materials loom large. I was able to consolidate the boxes into (mostly) like materials, which brought them down to about nine boxes (from the original twelve), one of which is not really scannable material, and I completed approximately a box and a half. I would say we’re looking at possible 7500 to 10,000 images in this collection. There may be some materials worth keeping in the remaining boxes, but when Dave Wenger, Director of Communications, asked my opinion about physical retention, I recommended tossing them. As long as the Picasa database (on their network drive) is backed up regularly, I feel the Communications Department’s needs will be well met by the database of electronic images. I was not able to get into scanning any negatives or slides, so any issues with whether or not the current equipment will be able to handle those materials adequately will have to be addressed by a future intern/capstone student (if the department wishes to continue with this kind of assistance). The issues I was experiencing with the scanner initially were a little distressing (scanned images appearing fine in the preview mode, but the final scan was “foggy”) until I spoke with a friend in the graphic arts field. To quote him “Scanners are voodoo”. At first I laughed (through the tears of frustration), but he basically suggested snapping the USB cable (to clear out any “phantom” electrons) and moving the connection to a different USB port. There are four ports on the front of the ‘droid I was using and I just went from left to right and, presto, the last one gave me no problems. I guess that’s why they call this a learning experience. ;-) Also, as I will be in the McCombs School until at least next May, I would be happy to provide guidance for anyone who comes in after me.

I would like to comment on using Google’s Picasa as photographic database tool. I had never used it prior to this project and I was quite impressed (especially for this being a free product) not only with the built-in tagging tool (allowing me to include any information that might improve search results, such as group names, VIP images, dates, departments , etc.), the search function, and the editing tools, but more specifically with the face recognition capabilities. It apparently takes face images already identified and finds similarities to faces that have not yet been identified, giving you the option to either accept or reject the image as matching a particular person. It’s not perfect (if it were, I’d be stunned), but it’s pretty damned good. I believe this will also be helpful to future scanners/taggers of this database who may not be as familiar with people in the McCombs School as I am. I will definitely be using this tool for my own personal database of photographs and will recommend it to others as an excellent Web 2.0 resource.

Now on to consolidating all of this information into a 60 second presentation for Friday’s event…