Processing: documents

When processing documents, it is important to handle them with extreme caution and care, and follow the steps previously outlined in the safe handling of artifacts and documents guide.

If you are working on a previously (or currently) accessioned collection of documents, one of the most important steps is to scan these documents and upload them to Omeka. The scanner can be found next to the Macbook in the library.

To scan a document, first open the "Epson Scan 2" application on the Macbook. Once you do this, open the scanner and place the document front side down on the scanner glass, and close the scanner. On the computer, make sure you are on the epscon scan window, and select "400" for the DPI. This gives us as crisp an image quality as we can have, which is important for aging documents written in cursive.

Next, you'll select "Preview" to give an outline of what the scan will look like. Here, you can adjust the cropping to only show the document, which is generally a good practice in producing quality scans for Omeka. After this, you can scan, and then make sure to save the file as its accessioning number. This makes organization and uploading to Omeka much simpler, and reduces confusion.