Digitizing Oversized Documents

Some of us favor digitizing all or most of our source documents. But the subject came up: how can you get a complete image of oversized documents, such as maps, plats, etc? I managed to solve that problem with Adobe Elements® (OEM version) which came installed on my computer (did I mention I love cheap or “included” software?) If you use different photo-editing software, take a look at how it may work similarly to the following solution.

To create an image of an oversized document, I place as much of it as I can on my scanner, starting with a corner. I scan that portion of the document to a JPG format then I move the document around, making sure that there is some overlap between scans. Each scan creates a JPG “puzzle piece.”

Once I have created all the puzzle pieces, I bring them into Elements® and use the “photomerge” feature to combine them into a single image. Elements® examines the edges of each smaller image to fit it together, just like a puzzle. The feature works remarkably well. Only occasionally do I have to manually manipulate the combining of images to get the unified image that I want. Once I have a single image, I convert the unified JPG to a PDF file or leave it as a JPG. I personally prefer the PDF as it is a consistent format with all my other documents. But if the image is, indeed, a photo, I leave it as a JPG.

Your photo-editing software may not use the term, “photomerge.” It may go by another term, such as “landscape” or “panorama.”

Technology Glitches

Well,

We are learning that there are either (a) a few backward compatibility bugs in MS Office® 2007 or (b) Sharon just “doesn’t get it.” I wrote the article, “Organizing Documents…” under Word 2003, but since I had to convert it to a PDF using Word 2007, it “buried” the only footnote in the entire document, which appeared on page 2.

So here’s the text of the footnote: “A good way to read this article is to sit in front of your computer and experiment with the features described here as you are reading.” Some of you may have already done just so, but for the rest, I thought I should mention it.

Archiving Family Oral History

Luna’s comments the other day started me to thinking about how to make family oral history available to others on a permanent basis. Presently, I do not know of any public archive that accepts the responsibility for preserving the oral history of individual families. We do a disservice to those family researchers who follow us not to consider long term availability. Consider, if you will, the stories you have heard about a genealogist’s life work going out with the garbage because his/her children did not wish to keep their work. Articles have been written exhorting us to donate our research to a library, a genealogical society or historical society just to preserve our work for future generations. From my training, I learned that one of the first questions I should ask and answer before I go out and collect interviews is “what will become of those recordings?”

So the question becomes: what do we do about family oral history interviews? They become more problematic because many of these interviews stay in audio or video format and are not transcribed. Libraries—if they accept such materials—prefer the transcription. (They also have a number of other prerequisites.) The cost of archiving recordings is more than most library budgets allow. Have any of you given thought to what will happen with your oral history research after you die? I am only now thinking about that eventuality, myself. My family is not notable in any way, just regular folks. A few have had experiences that might be accepted by professional/academic oral history projects or programs. For example, Texas Tech University (http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/) is collecting the oral histories of Viet Nam veterans; University of North Texas (http://www.library.unt.edu/ohp/) collects the oral histories of WWII vets. StoryCorps (www.storycors.org) does collect an infinite variety of interviews, but only those recorded in their facilities.

You can anticipate that much of your work will someday find its way to the landfill if other plans are not developed to preserve it. Personally, I would love for generations to come to actually hear the voice of their ancestor, telling their stories in their own words. I would love to be able to hear my Revolutionary War ancestor detail his experiences, not just read a deposition composed by a court clerk. It would be a wonderful form of “time travel.”

So what ideas can we develop to address this archival issue?