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Along with digitizing materials from our Special Collections & Archives for our Digital Collections, another important function of ZSR’s digitization lab is providing digitization for WFU faculty who require their materials digitized for research or instruction. A recent notable project is with Lynn Book, professor of Theatre and Dance.

The Lynn Book project dates back to 2017. Since this time, ZSR’s Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communications (DISC) and Technical Services teams have worked together to assemble a digital showcase of Book’s past performances. The first phase of this project was launched this semester, which features Gorgeous Fever, a performance originally showcased throughout the US in the 1990s.

Since the summer of 2018, the digitization lab was utilized to digitize selected flat media materials for the project. This included photographs, journal entries, brochures, note cards, color slides, correspondence, and sketches pertaining to the play.

We used our Zeutschel and Epson scanners to complete digitization. The Zeutschel was primarily used for the document based materials. The Epson was utilized for the image based items. High resolution archival files and web friendly (access) copies were created for all the materials digitized.

A key objective in this project was making sure that the color of the digitized items stayed true to the original as possible. A particular case was with Book’s sketchbook images. Initially, we used the Zeutschel to digitize the sketches because of time constraints. They were needed for an Omeka exercise at last year’s DH@Wake. We later concluded that the best image duplication for the sketches came from the Epson, which took a longer time to complete, but produced the best quality.

Capturing the truest color for Lynn Book’s sketches: The far left image was taken from the Zeutschel. The middle version is a color edited copy of the Zeutschel scan. The far right image we ultimately used was digitized from our Epson scanner.

Jay Buchanan, who has worked closely with Book on this project, played the leading role in assigning file naming conventions and creating the metadata for all of the objects digitized. A total of 471 items have been digitized for this project.