
Dephi
Part of being a digital historian is (no big surprise!) to preserve material digitally. I've been working on what seems to be a massive project of digitizing a few thousand slides from Prof. Guilliard, who taught in my department. He died in 2005 and left behind boxes and boxes of slides he used in his lectures. Many of them are now discolored (mostly a strange red), but scanning technology has been bringing them back to life. I am so excited about this since I have been using them in my own lectures and have been sharing them with one of my colleagues. Today I scanned some from Prof. Guillard's trip to Israel and another trip to Greece. The slides from Athens are incredible, but the frames of the slides are very large so I am having to scan them two at a time (which is taking me about 7 minutes/2 slides).
Another thing that I have to do with these is probably going to take me longer than scanning--Prof. Guilliard left behind notes for almost ever slide. I've been slowly making my way through the second box. What I had been doing is to look for websites and journal articles on various objects or sites, but that will have to wait until later--there is just too much raw material that needs to be scanned and categorized. I'll spend part of the summer attaching notes and popping this material up at my website. The next stage is to actually put all of this material to use. That will be a project for next year. After that I will have to tackle another pile of slides from another professor who used to teach in the department. Unfortunately for me, someone dumped these slides into large manila envelopes--so they aren't in any order, nor are there any notes. I may post some and ask others to help me identify them!
Another thing that I have to do with these is probably going to take me longer than scanning--Prof. Guilliard left behind notes for almost ever slide. I've been slowly making my way through the second box. What I had been doing is to look for websites and journal articles on various objects or sites, but that will have to wait until later--there is just too much raw material that needs to be scanned and categorized. I'll spend part of the summer attaching notes and popping this material up at my website. The next stage is to actually put all of this material to use. That will be a project for next year. After that I will have to tackle another pile of slides from another professor who used to teach in the department. Unfortunately for me, someone dumped these slides into large manila envelopes--so they aren't in any order, nor are there any notes. I may post some and ask others to help me identify them!