Tag: news
The HistoryMakers Chooses DT
DT Is Chosen By The HistoryMakers To Digitize Personal Collections
Digital Transitions has been selected by The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive, to digitize the historical personal collections of many interviewed for the archive. DT Heritage will supply best-in-class, preservation grade, digitization solutions, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, copy systems, scanning platforms, and automation software. Our Pixel Acuity specialists will combine these advanced technologies with adaptive workflows to preserve the various materials, including photographs, scrapbooks, letters, speeches, and other historically relevant documents that highlight and contextualize a person’s life and career.
The HistoryMakers is the foremost keeper of the country’s African American oral history and culture and has interviewed almost 3,400 African American leaders. Their collection offers the most extensive effort to record the Black experience since the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s and helps refashion a more inclusive record of American history. The urgent need to salvage endangered primary materials across the country created this project and will expose significant aspects of twentieth Century African American history currently missing from the historical record.
Peter Siegel, Owner and Founder of DT Heritage
“The HistoryMakers is the foremost keeper of the country’s African American oral history and culture. We’re honored that The HistoryMakers organization has entrusted DT Heritage with this incredible undertaking . . . The HistoryMakers’ digitization project is a great example of how organizations can make their treasures available to the world through the power of high-quality imaging.”
“We are thrilled about this unique partnership. Digital Transitions and their service division Pixel Acuity are giants in the field of digital preservation . . . They have stepped forward to help us rescue the personal collections of our HistoryMakers by using state-of-the-art digitization combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to share this unique documentation of African American life, history, and culture with the world.”
We’re honored to have been chosen by The HistoryMakers and are grateful to have the opportunity to digitize this collection. To learn more click here.
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How Can Pixel Acuity Help Your Digitization Program In the Age of Social Distancing?
There are many unknowns in the world today and Cultural Heritage institutions everywhere are facing the same challenge – how to best serve the public and their mission while keeping their employees safe and healthy. We heard this first hand from many institutions during and following our recent webinar titled “Digitization in the Age of Social Distancing.” When coronavirus (COVID-19) struck, these institutions that are responsible for promoting the arts, history, and culture had to close their doors to the very public they serve. In order to function in the “new normal,” people became increasingly reliant on technology, using it not only as their primary means of gathering information but also interacting with the world. With this growing dependence on online and remote access, collection digitization and digital preservation have proven even more vital than ever before. At this moment in time, we as a Cultural Heritage community can come together, reaching the world and the public in new ways through collection digitization and online publication.
With decades of combined hands-on experience imaging cultural heritage in all its forms, Pixel Acuity offers highly specialized knowledge of the inner workings of large-scale digitization efforts as well as customizable workflows and production solutions to fit your institution’s individual needs. By working with you in assessing your individual digital imaging needs, Pixel Acuity can provide a tailored digitization workflow plan for either on-site or off-site digitization that will maximize efficiency while implementing OSHA and CDC guidelines to ensure a safe working environment for everyone involved. We are committed to providing the same high standard of care and production quality whether on-site or off-site. In both scenarios, we are dedicated to applying archival-quality methodologies and Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) standards to our imaging of collections to create preservation-grade images of the highest possible resolution and quality control.
Although some parts of the world are beginning to reopen to varying degrees, Cultural Heritage institutions are experiencing a “new normal” with reduced on-site staff and hours spent in-person with physical collections. We at Pixel Acuity understand that when every in-person hour counts, priorities have to be re-evaluated in order to optimize time spent with the collection. Within the digitization workflow, physical preparation and digitization of materials requires hands-on work with the physical collection, while tasks such as metadata entry, post-processing, and quality control (QC) can be completed remotely. Pixel Acuity provides both on-site and off-site digital imaging services to the Cultural Heritage community. We are able to install state of the art photographic equipment – developed by Digital Transitions – on-site at Cultural Heritage institutions, as well as provide highly qualified imaging technicians to implement digitization workflows and create high-resolution digital images. We also are able to arrange for off-site digitization production at any of our production facilities in Chantilly, Virginia; New York City, New York; or Los Angeles, California. With this service, Cultural Heritage institutions can send their collections to one of our facilities, where our certified art/object handlers and imaging technicians can digitize the collections and then return the digital files and physical collections back to the original institution. This allows Cultural Heritage institution employees to minimize the amount of time they have to spend on-site with the collection during the digitization process, and enables us to provide them with digital files that can be worked on remotely post-digitization. Along with providing imaging technicians and object/art handlers for digitization production, Pixel Acuity is also able to supply qualified staff to assist with collection processing duties such as rehousing collections, barcode application, and metadata creation.
Like everyone in the Cultural Heritage community, we at Pixel Acuity understand how difficult it is to serve the community and our clients in these uncertain times, and we are working harder than ever to provide customizable imaging solutions to help institutions reach their digitization goals. To learn more about our services or to obtain more information, please contact us.