Using a scanner or other device to create a digital representation or electronic photograph of an image. The scanning process is often labor-intensive and costly, requiring a substantial investment in handling and processing original materials and their surrogate images. The current strategy is to capture an image at the highest resolution appropriate to the original, and store it off-line as an archival image on CD-ROM or magnetic tape. Techniques such as lossy compression and subsampling can then be used to create derivative images for use online. In the future, as the ability to deliver high-quality archival scans develops, it will be possible to place the archival scan online without cost of recapture. Scanning can be done in-house or contracted out to a vendor. Whether scanning is done in-house or outsourced, quality of the images can vary widely. Image specifications should be stated clearly in the contract with the vendor and sample images (at varying resolutions) of the materials to be scanned should be requested of the vendor prior to the start of the project.
Return To Glossary