Page 364 - Green - Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook. 2nd ed

Chapter 12: Artifact Photography 343
If the data will remain static, then burning onto a CD-ROM or a DVD ROM may be a good option. CD-ROMs currently are relatively small for storage of large graphic files; their capacity is around 600–800MB. DVDs, on the other hand, are much larger and can store up to 10 times the quantity of data. Other options include getting a very large hard disk, 100GB-disks are now relatively cheap and should last a considerable amount of time, or down- loading to an Internet service provider (ISP) that can provide off-site storage, or in a big organization utilize the system server for storage.
Having decided how and where the images will be stored, the issue of relocating images needs to be resolved. Currently, a number of software packages have an interface which provides thumbnail reviews of graphic images (ACDSee, iPhoto, Camedia, Photoshop 7, etc.). So instead of seeing a list of meaningless or nearly meaningless file names, a small image of the graphic is shown with the file name. This is like an electronic contact sheet and is extremely useful. This makes the process much easier. Then all that needs to be done is to ensure that the labels of the files bear some sensible information relating to their content. At the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Maritime Museum, we have been developing procedures to ensure that digital images can be stored and retrieved efficiently. The objective of the project was to determine how digital images should be stored on the museum’s server. The digital images referred to are the high-quality images suitable for publication and not low- quality images used for the Internet. The images are high quality because it takes no longer to scan it in high quality than low quality. Therefore, it is more efficient to scan all images at high quality and in color (where appro- priate), and then use the high-quality image for the source of an image that would subsequently be saved at lower quality for the Internet. Digital images included the following types of material:
1. Scanned black and white, and color negatives from the negative collection; these include 35-mm, 5 ¥ 4 inch, half-plates, and glass plates
2. Scanned slides from the color slide collection, essentially 35-mm slides
3. Scanned hard copy images, pictures, maps, prints, etc.
4. Digital camera images
5. Artifact object photographs with registration number and scale
included in the picture that can be created from any of above cate- gories
The negatives were stored in the small 12-drawer metal filing cabinets and cataloged on a FileMaker Pro database. The fields included: film number, date, location, keyword subject, and keyword category. The nega- tive collection was indexed by negative number—the number referring to