The first two days of this week were half sick days for me--I managed to drag myself to NOMA to engage in tunnel-vision scanning, and then called in to work. However, the hyper-focus decongestants inspire in me led to some even better efficiency refinements in the scanning process for me; it did not, however, help my descriptions of items.
What I realized is that I could scan up to three articles in one file, depending on how much space they occupied on the page--the MagicWand records about 8 linear inches "across". This way I could do three total scans for two-three articles, instead of the typical six-nine scans. Then using trusty MS Paint, I could choose my best crops for each article out of these three files and use the 'Save As...' function to leave the original file open to cropping for the other articles. The time saved was incredible--I increased my output from two pages of scanning, editing/adjustment, and file backup in two hours to four pages--double the output! Since the biggest hurdle in this digitization project (and any) is getting the files made and standardized in the first place, this is great--the scanning part of project completion time could theoretically be halved, and the actual scrapbooks can be closed and stored all the sooner. My only concern is how to leave clear instructions for future interns, and if these instructions will be enough--I do notice in my day-to-day professional dealing that many people are still resistant to learning computer tasks as simple as MS Paint if they've decided that they're "not computer people". Conversely, it is unlikely that these people will be looking for an internship of archival digitization!
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