Once discussions with my DFW supervisor and the U.S. Documents Librarian had resulted in a significant number of documents, I began work on the digitization of items, which actually consisted of a number of discrete subtasks.
The first step in preparing volumes for digitization was a page count, including information about color, greyscale, and black and white pages, as well as pagination and other information.
The FADGI Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials (approved September 2016) provided a specific set of practices for use in capturing selected materials and processing the resulting image files. These standards impose strict limits on the kinds of processing which can be performed on images, and scanning according to them differed from previous work in which I had used color adjustment and an image sharpening filter.
All images for this project were captured in full-color at 400 DPI. In an effort to comform as closely as possible with FADGI guidelines, post-processing of page images was limited to cropping and rotating.
A large number of the documents selected for digitization were able to be captured using a flatbed scanner available in the Preservation Services Department which had not yet been used extensively for this purpose.
Many of the government documents selected for digitization as part of this project were unbound, stapled pages. Following removal of staples--which were rusty and posed a preservation concern--these documents lent themselves to the use of a flatbed scanner. It allowed for the capture of images which conformed to FADGI requirements and were all situated identically within the image frame, facilitating simple batch-cropping operations.
For images acquired using the flatbed scanner, the non-commercial freeware IrfanView graphic viewer proved an easy-to-use tool for batch-cropping and rotating.
As a part of my fieldwork, I created a manual describing how to use this tool to perform batch cropping and rotating of captured files. This manual can be provided to student workers and others performing post-processing of image files captured using the flatbed scanner.
None of the government documents we selected for digitization as part of this project were bound, and so most were captured using a flatbed scanner as described above. A small number were saddle-stiched, however, and it made sense to capture these using the Preservation Services unit's Atiz BookDrive Mark II book scanner and bundled Capture Pro software.
Post-processing for these left-right paired page images was performed using proprietary BookDrive Editor Pro software. How-to documentation for using the BookDrive itself as well as bundled capture and processing software was pre-existing, and I made use of this material along with receiving hands-on training in the use of the equipment.