Digitization Procedures
Photos
While the Calumet Regional Archives holds glass negatives for the bulk of the U.S. Steel Photograph Collections, we scanned exclusively from prints. Most prints were 8"x10", but the collection includes a few panoramic views. Prints were scanned on a Linotype-Hell (now Heidelberg) Saphir Ultra 2 flatbed scanner, using the Silverfast scanning software, with the following specifications:
- Scanned at 14-bit grayscale; exported to Photoshop as 8-bit grayscale
- 300 dpi
- White point set at 3% black, black point set at 97% black
- Image straightened to the outline of the negative, not to the picture
- Small black border even on all sides
- Saved as uncompressed TIFF
JPEG derivatives for access measuring 200 and 600 pixels on the long side were created using ImageMagick.
Articles
Articles were scanned from bound originals on a Microtek ScanMaker 9600XL flatbed scanner as 8-bit grayscale TIFF images. The page images were converted to PDF format with Adobe Acrobat, and converted to DjVu format with Lizardtech's DjVu Document Encoder (now subsumed by their Document Express product). Full-text of the articles was created by running page images through Prime Recognition OCR software, then editing the resulting text manually.