Log 11: Casasola Project
June 21, 2024
9:00am-5:00pm
UTEP
TiJeat Berry
Intern supervisor: Joy Urbina, Special Collections Supervisor: Claudia Rivers, Photo Archival Project Supervisor: Gia
Below is an image of me digitizing the final negatives in Box 4 of the Casasola Project. In this image you can see the digital camera, and the adjustment column as well as the light board. So the repetitiveness of this task allowed me to become more comfortable with the process of working with the historical images carefully so not to mess them up. Gia told me that getting finger prints off the negatives is quite difficult.
Below is another image of my work station with the laptop, white table, and lightboard. In the background you can see the reel to reel that David is using to work on a archiving a radio program. To the far right of the image are the stacks of the archival material that is open to the public upon request. On the laptop screen are some of the digitized images.
Closer image of the laptop screens. I believe that Mr. Casasola named these negatives, "Dames". There was no major adjustments were done to the images on this phase of the project, the most I did was flip the pictures, but that was not mandatory. I did not rename the uploads, it was helpful to retain the numbering assigned by the program.
Phase 2
Digitization using Adobe Photoshop. In this phase we used Adoboe Photoshop tools:
Cropped
Inverted
Black n White
Levels
Healing Brush
File Renamer
Above are some of the results of photoshop. I learned more about pixels, and using the healing brush to fix up the pictures. Levels and healing brush was used to fix backgrounds which due to age and handling had some blemishes. We would use the brush to "spread and copy the surrounding area to the area that needed to be 'healed'". That is my own wording of the explanation of what we did.
I had to pay great attention to detail and rely on Gia to get my photoshop correct, sometimes I thought the changes made the individuals look animated, but I found it hard to explain what I meant when asked. I think what I meant is that they did not look real and alive. The woman in the image below looks like a person who was alive and the feeling and colors give the impression of the 1940's; others gave the impression of a modern interpretation of what the 1940's would look like.
I could have done the photoshop all day! It was also comforting to hear that some of the workers did not have experience with these programs until they were hired because I am in the same situation.
Above is me saying goodbye to the Special Collections Dept. These are some of the books in the Carl Hertzog room; there are a few books here that were printed in the 1500's. And they have intricate pages, and covers, as you can see one of the cover is engraved.
Sermones was published in 1496 in Venice by Johannes Hertzog; Carl received it as a gift, and he published a piece of this item as part of his descriptions of the history of printing,
Above are books that were made by publishers to show off their skills to the rich who were the only ones who could develop and maintain libraries during this time. One of these books has Fore edge paintings on the book pages which when closed displays a painting. I do not have an image of the book in the collection, but here is an example of the practice.
During this time these publishing designs were used by publishers to sell their craft to the people who collected books and created libraries. If a publisher displayed how pretty they could make a cover, that they can make a cover out of metal, that they could put a drawing on the edges of pages, they would be hired/find patrons in families such as de Medici's and French Kings. Also these families would use the books to show off how great their library was to others, and that they could afford these types of items.
This I might have forgotten to mention that I learned in the Special Collections:
Mold --> yellow or white, fuzzy, musty smell
Linear Feet
Acid
Wood --> the book shelves are metal but with fake wood lining. Susannah asserted that they do not want wood in the collection because it works against the preservation process. I recall her telling me that cockroaches like to eat the paper and the glue on the pages.
Cockroaches--> You will see them leave paths of eaten glue in items.
Grants
They do not have enough room for all the collections
Their focus is on Southwest U.S.A. so items that do not fit that criteria are not kept.
!!!PAPER!!!
Temperature Control
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