UC Teece Museum volunteer Michael Kingsley has just completed an incredible five year project digitising the glass plate lantern slides in the Logie Collection. In this post, Michael reflects on what he has learned through the process and offers some sage advice to others who are embarking on similar projects.
Introduction
When I reflect on my final undergraduate year at the University of Canterbury in 2019, I mostly think about beginning my internship at the Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities. I couldn’t have imagined that I would be lucky enough to still be a part of the Museum’s incredible team over five years later. Since then, I have developed an intimate connection to the subject of my internship; eight double-rowed, tightly packed, lacquered wooden drawers containing glass plate lantern slides.
Though many people probably think of the Teece Museum in relation to its priceless collection of Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern antiquities, the Teece Museum also hosts a modest collection of the University of Canterbury’s analogue photographic material. Miss Marion Steven, the University’s renowned classics teacher and founder of the James Logie Memorial Collection, procured a substantial amount of material, including transmissive photographic material like magic lantern slides. Used as a visual teaching aid, these slides would have allowed students to behold a curated collection of images showing ancient pottery, art, and archaeological sites.
Glass plate lantern slides are created by placing a negative in contact with an emulsified piece of glass and exposing it to light. These slides were likely created some time in the 1930s-1940s and used until magic lantern slide projectors were made obsolete by 35mm film slide projectors in the 1950s. Slides would have been loaded into a projector like the Delineascope Model O-J from the Spencer Lens Company. This type of lantern slide projector would have been commonplace throughout the University of Canterbury campus in the early part of the 20th century [i].
The Project
The Teece Museum, under the leadership of curator Terri Elder, began the task of cataloguing these drawers of lantern slides in early 2015. This project utilised a revolving team of interns as part of the University of Canterbury’s Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) program, providing students invaluable hands-on experience within the cultural heritage sector. My role in this project began in 2019 when I became the final PACE intern to work on cataloguing the lantern slides.
Contrary to many interns and gallery hosts at the Teece Museum, I don’t come from a classics background. As an undergraduate history major that was passionate about 20th century history, I initially felt out of my depth, being surrounded by so many brilliant people with profound knowledge of the classical world. However, it eventually dawned on me in ensuing years that I foster a set of skills that offer a different kind of value to cultural heritage work than those of my brilliant peers.
At the end of my internship in early 2020, Terri asked if I would be interested in learning how to digitise the lantern slide collection. At the time I had a basic working knowledge of photography, and I keenly took this opportunity to continue volunteering at the Teece Museum and gain some new skills. Since none of the Teece staff had much experience with digitisation, Terri and I were tasked with creating a bespoke digitisation workflow that would fit our needs. Using digitisation resources from other cultural heritage organisations, as well as ample amounts of our own recurrent trial and error, we were eventually able to construct a robust digitisation workflow for the lantern slides.
The base principle of digitising transmissive material, at the time, sounded simple; mount a camera above a lightbox and place the material in the centre of frame. I vastly underestimated the complexity I now know is inherent to any digitisation workflow and soon reckoned with several questions that took many hours of research, and even more trial and error.
Challenges
The scope of this digitisation project was, in theory, simple: to capture decent quality photographs for catalogue and research reference. This would be achieved by capturing the front and back of the slides, then capturing a metadata target with its corresponding slide. The Museum had a Panasonic Lumix FZ300 12.1-megapixel camera, a lightbox, and a tripod. Sufficient, we thought, to get a good start on digitising. It became quickly apparent that we had several problems right out of the gate.
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- Why aren’t my images sharp and defined?
- What is the most efficient way to capture and process images?
- Why don’t the colours of my image match the colour of the physical object?
- Why is my lighting all over the place?
Knowledge
First and foremost was the issue of knowledge; more specifically, lacking the technical knowledge to decipher the completely esoteric photography language in many resources I found online while troubleshooting. Even with resources that spoke in broader, more simple terms, I still experienced a sense of information overload and often didn’t know where to begin. It is also difficult for a photography novice to know what sources to trust when faced with conflicting information and advice. This all goes to show how vital knowledge is to an effective digitisation workflow, something which, in our case, only time and experience could truly solve; time used to make every mistake possible and learn from first-hand experiences to ensure that these missteps are remedied progressing forward through the project.
Equipment
Expertise issues were not our only concern, however. After many months, the glaring limitations of our equipment became clear [ii]. For many smaller organisations, digitisation with equipment of our calibre (in the early stages of this project) is completely acceptable, if the only goal is access and legibility. However, the calibre of images I had initially captured were, in my opinion, limited to purely referential use and not fit for publication. Colour [iii], resolution, and lighting would vary wildly between capture sessions, and there were significant issues being caused by the camera lens [iv].
As somewhat of a perfectionist, however, I wanted to push myself to produce images of good enough quality for sufficient longevity, more detailed research, and the potential for printing. If we were going to sink hundreds of hours into capturing this material, it made sense to strive for a standard of imaging that reduced or eliminated the need for re-digitising the material in the future. In late 2023 I had purchased a new camera to practice and improve my photography skills and began using it in place of the Museum’s camera, noticing a marked improvement in quality after doing so [v].
However, my camera was still not ideal for macro photography of transmissive material, and for future projects [vi] the Teece Museum has recently been approved the funding to acquire a full-frame Canon camera and Kaiser copy-stand [vii]. This equipment, along with other upgrades over time have been a huge stride towards future-proofing the Museum’s digitisation and general photography requirements.
Environmental Control
Another hurdle we faced was figuring out how to achieve consistent looking exposure, lighting, and colour. At the start of the digitisation process our capture area was a table in the Classics post-graduate study room, with several large Victorian sash windows. This, as I’m sure anyone with digitisation experience can imagine, presented an absolute nightmare in the form of inconsistent exposure and colour across different capture sessions, as well as egregious reflections from the glass slides. Even in the hands of a professional these problems would be impossible to manage without more suitable equipment and controlled environment. To create a capture area where we could control direct lighting, ambient light, and reflections, we eventually purchased a light tent, an improved LED lightbox, and utilised cross-polarisation to minimise reflections.
Professional Experience
The summer of 2022 marked a major turning point in the direction of the lantern slide digitisation project when I began working at New Zealand Micrographic Services, the leaders of cultural heritage digital imaging in Aotearoa. Through my summer of on-the-job training, and my subsequent years as a digitisation technician, I’ve been able to bring my knowledge back to the Teece Museum to remedy many of issues and find ways to improve our digitisation workflow.
Favourite Images
As a digitisation technician, it is not usually in the scope of our work to focus on material as it is captured; it is our job to capture the material accurately and efficiently. However, when you spend years working on a collection, like I have at the Teece Museum, you eventually can’t help but appreciate interesting or beautiful items.
Some of my favourite images in the Logie slide collection are a series of three images taken of the Doric temple near the ancient city of Segesta, in what is now Sicily, Italy. To me, these slides tell the story of two men (one of whom is possibly Associate Professor Henry Dan Broadhead) and their horses taking a well-deserved rest at the temple, probably after touring the ruins of Segesta. In the first slide we see two men resting at the Western end of Segesta Temple; the man on the left is seated on the steps while the man on the right is leaning against one of the enormous columns. They are dressed in suits and hats typical of the early 20th century CE and are both wearing spurs on their boots. In the second slide, we see the north side of the temple, with three-to-four horses resting in the foreground; you can see a glimpse of the seated man still resting at the west entrance. The final slide shows a view from behind where the men are resting, down the length of the temple.
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Whilst the images of artefacts and documents in the Logie lantern slide collection are as stunning as they are fascinating, it is images of archaeological sites and of people which I personally engage with the most. Many of these kinds of images in the collection are incredibly detailed and clear, and are likely derivatives of original negatives. Looking so clearly into these ‘high resolution’ (in our modern terminology) images is truly like looking through a window in time. Some notable examples of such images include R26-3B-70, a possibly personal photograph of the Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles) in the British Museum, and a series of slides from R26-3B-15 – R26-3B-24, showing photographs from a visit to the Erechtheion (Temple of Athena Polias) sometime in the early 20th century CE.
Lessons Learned
This years-long digitisation project has been an incredible experience, with the rewards adequately compensating for the hours of head-scratching and frustration. For those of you reading this case study, who may be in a similar position that we once were and are apprehensive about the digitisation process, I would like to offer a few important tips.
Keep it Simple
The most important lesson that I can pass on is to keep it simple. The scope of digitisation projects can quickly grow into an overwhelming process, so it is important to have a clearly defined goal for the digitisation of your objects, and ensure you have the required equipment and resources. Planning is key and will prevent organisational chaos further down the line.
Organisation
It cannot be overstated how important tracking and file organisation is to a digitisation workflow. You should have an itemised spreadsheet of each item you are planning to digitise, organised by their accession number or label, and sign off during each step of the process. Typically, these processes would be broken down into:
| Preparation | Capture | Post-Capture Processing | Quality Control | Delivery/Upload |
In my experience, poor tracking is the largest contributor to wasted time. Whether you are the sole operator responsible for the project from start-to-end, or part of a team, losing track of what has been captured, where unprocessed and processed files are, who completed a certain task, file renaming, and reshoots will lead to countless hours of backtracking that is entirely avoidable with proper planning and tracking.
Make the Most of Your Equipment
My last piece of advice is, if it is possible for your institution/organisation, to invest in decent digitisation equipment, particularly if you are planning to digitise large collections. For reflective materials such as documents or objects, invest in the best camera within your budget [viii], a steady tripod or copy stand, and decent quality LED light panels. It is vital to invest in a good lens, as a bad lens on a good camera will completely invalidate purchasing a good camera in the first place. For transmissive material like negatives and slides, I would recommend the same camera setup with a good quality lightbox. However, flatbed scanners like the Epson V-850 are a good alternative for the more technologically challenged, where you can simply load material, press a few buttons and have ready-to-go images [ix]. For technical specifications of equipment, please refer to the endnotes.
Resources
For those who are still at a complete loss at where to start, there are a number of fantastic resources that offer simple guides and explanations to the general digitisation workflow, and how to set up a capture area. The U.K. based SHARE Museums East has a brilliant digitisation guide [x] that is detailed while still being friendly to the photography novice. In a similar vein, Te Papa Tongarewa offer a comprehensive overview of digitisation standards and procedures [xi], including short YouTube videos for more visual learners.
For the slightly more technologically savvy, Digital NZ Ā-Tihi o Aotearoa offers a wonderfully detailed guide to digitising all types of material and media, and digital collection management. And finally, for the most comprehensive guide to digitisation workflows, accuracy standards, equipment, environments, and metadata, you should look to the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative and their Technical Guidelines for Digitising Cultural Heritage Materials [xii].
Conclusion
Being able to digitally preserve images like these for more people to see and appreciate makes me feel unbelievably lucky to do the work I have done here at the Teece Museum. When you work so intimately with collections it is hard not to grow attached and feel a small sense of ownership and pride for them. I have spent over five years working with this lantern slide collection, and in that time produced a digital collection that I am incredibly proud of.
The collection will eventually be available through the UC Teece Museum online catalogue, which can be accessed here.
Michael Kingsley is a digitisation technician at New Zealand Micrographic Services, and in his spare time volunteers at the UC Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities. Michael initially worked at the Teece as a cataloguer as part of the University’s PACE internship program, and has spent the better part of the last five years digitising lantern slides from the Logie Collection.
Endnotes
[i] https://ehive.com/collections/200934/objects/1208829/lantern-slide-projector
[ii] Our Lumix FZ300 is a fixed-lens camera with only 12-megapixels and a small 1/2.3” BSI-CMOS sensor, far from an ideal camera for digital imaging.
[iii] Particularly white balance in the initial stages, as it took some time to learn how to achieve consistent white balance.
[iv] OOur Lumix FZ-300, despite boasting macro-photography capability, was outputting captures with noticeable lens distortion and sharpness falloff, which we mitigated by by limiting our workable resolution to around 1500 pixels on a slide’s longest edge. This is a far cry from what is recommended by the F.A.D.G.I Technical Guidelines.
[v] An Olympus E-OMD Mark IV, a 20.3 MP mirrorless/point and shoot hybrid type camera. The main draw for using it in place of the Museum’s Lumix FZ-300 was the almost doubled resolution it provided, and its improved remote shooting software. Even with its kit 14-42mm lens, images were much sharper and the improvements in colour and sharpness were unquestionable.
[vi] Such as digitising the Logie Collection’s 35mm film slides.
[vii] Specifically, a Canon EOS RP with an 80mm RF macro lens. The EOS RP is a great entry-level full-frame mirrorless camera, giving 26.2 MP and over an extra 1000 pixels on the long edge than the Olympus E-OMD Mark IV.
[viii] Ideally a mid-range mirrorless camera with a good lens. The Teece’s Canon EOS RP and 80mm Macro lens have yielded great results for us, and I would recommend them if you were unsure what camera to choose.
[ix] It’s worth nothing that, to achieve resolutions that meet the current standards for digital preservation, flatbed scanners will need an inordinate amount of scanning time. This is fine if you have other work to complete during scanning, but for both quality and timesaving I would recommend going with overhead camera capture for transmissive material.
[x] Share Museums East, A Guide to Digitisation, 2017. https://www.sharemuseumseast.org.uk/files/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/digitisation-final-full.pdf
[xi] Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Digitising collections, https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-museums-and-galleries/how-guides/collection-management/digitising-collections
[xii] Federal Agencies Digital Guidlines Initiative, Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials, 2023. https://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI%20Technical%20Guidelines%20for%20Digitizing%20Cultural%20Heritage%20Materials_3rd%20Edition_05092023.pdf. This is currently in its third edition as of May 2023, but always check for the most recent edition.