Category Archives: University Archives

Buck Winn (2 of 2): Isolate Part of an Image in Photoshop

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The other image request for the University Archives Buck Winn Exhibition was for an isolated version of Anna Hyatt Huntington’s statue of Fighting Stallions, so that viewers of the exhibition could download the image and recreate the base on which the statue stands. Originally, Buck Winn designed an elaborate natural landscape to hold the statue (see Winn’s design here). Over the years, his design was removed and a simple concrete structure now exists. Visit the Online Exhibition Here for more information!

Image of Fighting Stallions (Original)

I began by making an image of the stallions with a digital camera. After deciding on the best view of the stallions from the digital image captures, I opened it through Adobe’s Camera Raw Editor and adjusted some of the values of the image. I kept most of my attention on how the stallions looked, since that is what was going to be in the final image. I also increased the saturation of the image, particularly in the greens. Since the Stallions are gray and black, increasing saturation in the greens did not effect the Stallions. Making this adjustment will make it easier to select parts of the image i want to eliminate in Photoshop.

Once satisfied with my adjustments in Camera Raw I opened the Image in Photoshop. Here you can see the increased saturation.

Image of Fighting Stallions (Saturated)

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Buck Winn (1 of 2): Creating a Coloring Page from a Photograph in Photoshop

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In mid-March, we received a request to provide images for an exhibition on the work of the Texas artist and sculptor, Buck Winn, that exists on Texas State University’s campus. One of his works on the façade of Flowers Hall is a bas-relief sculpture with stained glass inset throughout. Originally the stained glass allowed light to shine into the stairwell on the interior of the building, however over the years the interior was altered, and the stained glass was filled in. Laura Kennedy, a University Archivist, wanted to create a coloring page to allow viewers of the exhibition to download the image and color in the stained-glass portions with their own interpretation. Getting a good image of the full artwork was challenging, since the façade of the building is tall and narrow, with trees and a staircase in front of it, and there’s no way to take a photograph of the building straight on.

I began by capturing an image of the entire mural, with as minimal interference from surrounding elements. I also had to consider time of day, to avoid interference from dark shadows or harsh sunlight.

Buck Winn mural at Flowers Hall, Texas State University

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Using a %50 Gray Layer in Photoshop in place of Dodging and Burning

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Whenever we receive a request for a printed photograph or custom image work, Photoshop is usually our tool of choice for fine-tuning and one of the most common adjustments is selectively brightening or darkening areas of the image.  While there are multiple tools for enhancing the entire image, working only on particular sections of the image takes a little more care.  One tool, Dodge and Burn, which takes its name from the process of adding more or less light to the exposure of the print from a darkroom enlarger, uses the Brush tool to lighten or darken an area of an image. However, this tool can often lead to creating artifacts and uneven transitions within the image. Highlights can become too white and shadows become blocked up; overuse of the tool can easily lead to a loss of detail in middle tones too. For a less destructive method using a 50% gray layer in combination with the brush tool, the steps below may be followed to make adjustments similar to dodging/burning for selected areas.

We are using this image from the San Marcos Daily Record Collection (from the University Archives) to illustrate one way to make localized adjustments to an image, by lightening the dresses of the majorettes only.

SMDR Photographic Negatives Collection, [1930s][Billy Wyatt], SMDR_1930s-1_018

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Project Spotlight: The President’s Report to the Board of Regents

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Texas State University is a member of the Texas State University System, currently governed by a nine-member Board of Regents who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate.  For their quarterly meetings, the President of Texas State prepares a report of University activities and proposals for the Board’s review.  While the reports that are now released are digitally accessible, the University Archives at Texas State holds the official paper records of these reports, the earliest of which dates back to 1923.  Since these records include an overview of budgets, enrollment, faculty salaries, and construction and renovation details, in addition to a broad look at notable events occurring at the University, they’re of great value to local researchers and administration and a high priority for digitization to increase the ease of access to these materials. Due to age and variability of the physical reports, the oldest bound material, ranging from 1923 – 1969, was captured separately in the workflow described below.

Project Specs:Fujitsu

Start Date: September 17, 2019

Completion Date: December 16, 2019

Total Images Captured: 7,031

Total PDFs Created: 183

Capture Method: Fujitsu fi-6670 multi feed scanner; Sony A7R II

Programs Used: Paper Stream Capture, Capture One, ScanTailor Advanced. Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Jupyter Notebook

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Tech Reflect: Civilian Conservation Corps cassette tapes

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Tech Reflect is a platform for Digital & Web Services technicians to look-back on a particular project and share their experiences, thoughts, and lessons learned.

By: Zachary Johnson, Digital A/V Technician

The Civilian Conservation Corps Project (CCC) was founded in 1933, ending in 1942. It was a government-funded organization originally meant for unemployed, unmarried men between the age of 18 and 25. The age limit was eventually moved up to 28 (although most camps didn’t care if you were 16 or 17). FDR created the CCC as a part of his ‘New Deal’ in order to provide money to families that were in desperate need of cash during the great depression

The jobs done by the CCC enrollees were mostly construction, but that is not all they were known for doing. They were truckers (construction & transportation), medical staff (assistants to doctors, nurses, and dentists), hairdressers, miners in rock quarries (although they were sometimes used to help find artifacts in historically significant dig sites), and cooks (enrollees who made breakfast, lunch, and dinner), or cashiers at concession stands in the rec hall (for extra cash, not as their main/sole job). Each enrollee was paid around $27 a month, but they only received $5 and the rest was sent to their families to help them get through the depression, though the amount paid could vary from year to year. The CCC operated mostly through national parks and was run by the U.S. military, although enrollees did not have quite as many rules and responsibilities as military personnel had. As a for instance, they still had to make their beds in the morning and have them inspected, but they didn’t have to do things like saluting to the flag.

Dr. Ron Brown has approximately 42 cassette tapes of oral interviews conducted in 1991-1993 while he was working on a history of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in Mesa Verde National Park. The Mesa Verde site is significant because unlike most CCC sites, most of the documents and archives related to CCC remained on site and were not sent to the National Archives. Persons who were members of the CCC in Mesa Verde were interviewed for their recollections. Shortly after he completed the interviews, he became a full-time administrator and did not return to the project until Jan. 1, 2018, when he returned to full-time faculty status. The interviews were collected on cassette tapes of good quality at the time. His interview equipment was better than average quality at the time, and the interview cassettes have not been run since the early 1990s.

The tapes are historically significant documents that are important for his own research and would be of use to the Texas State Archives as well as to the MVNP Research Center in Colorado. The tapes were captured, edited, and given back to Dr. Brown in the months of October and November 2018 by Zachary Johnson. After the digital capture, the physical tapes will be given to the university archiving department at Texas State University library, while the digital copies will be transcribed and given back to Dr.Brown for his project.

How I Created Digital Files from Legacy Technology

  1. Check to make sure all the recording devices work properly
  2. Check the condition of the physical tape
  3. Record the audio on each side of the tape
  4. Edit/clean up the audio
  5. Turn in for Quality Control (QC)

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San Marcos Daily Record Negatives

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Collage

Top row: SMDR_1950s-SF-11_May 16 2017_13-38-29, SMDR_1930s-56_027 Bottom row: SMDR_1940s50s-88_001, SMDR_1930s-58_004, SMDR_1930s-26_016

In January of 2016 University Archives received an estimated 800,000 photo negatives, transparent strips of film that depict an image with the colors inverted, from the San Marcos Daily Record. This collection contains images spanning from the 1930s to the 2000s. The negatives consist of a mixture of nitrate and safety film. Nitrate film, a flexible, plastic film base, was created in the late 1800s as a replacement to glass plates and safety film was created as a substitute for nitrate. Nitrate film is the same film used in motion pictures which caused many devastating fires during film screenings in the early 1900s. This film becomes less stable and more likely to auto-ignite as it deteriorates. Safety film, as the name suggests, is much safer to use and store, however, the film still degrades over time.

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History of Spring Lake

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mermaid-gato1

In a previous post I discussed a project to digitize and create an exhibit related to the history of Aquarena Springs. Entitled The “History of Spring Lake”, the online exhibit is now available. Only a portion of the archives’ materials are included in this exhibit.

This “History of Spring Lake” exhibit was initially planned and constructed by Jason Crouch, a Graduate Student in the Public History Program at the Texas State University Center for Texas Public History. Digitization support was provided by Digital Media Specialist, Jeremy Moore. Programming support and customization of the Omeka site was provided by Jason Long. Additional support provided by Todd Peters, Head, Digital & Web Services.

This exhibit was edited and revised to feature a variety of primary source materials from the University Archives. The purpose of this exhibit is to provide a brief history of Spring Lake; it is not meant to be an exhaustive history of the people, places, or details.

The University Archives would like to thank Anna Huff and John Fletcher for providing content representing The Meadows Center, as well as the local repositories and local collections that allowed us to feature their materials in this exhibit.

Then and Now

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Several websites that feature juxtaposed historic and recent images have appeared over the last year. It is a fun way to showcase historic images in an archive. The Knight Lab at Northwestern University has created an easy tool to create photo juxtapositions. The software allows a user to move a slider to swipe between the two versions of an image.

We decided to use the JuxtaposeJS software to create a few test images to learn more about the process. We took a couple of prints of historic photos of Old Main we had recently digitized, and tried to find the locations from where they were shot.  For this pilot project, we did not use the high resolution PhaseOne digital camera. We wanted to keep the amount of equipment we needed to carry to a minimum on our first attempt, so Jeremy used a smaller Olympus OM-D E-M5II capable of stitching together 40mb images from several shots, and a tripod.

The resulting images were scaled and visual reference points lined up in Adobe Photoshop. The JuxtaposeJS  website automatically creates the HTML embed code to insert into a website.

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Click to view juxtaposed Then and Now images of Old Main.

 

Old School Work Study

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thacher_gary_1956

During the early part of the University’s history, “work study” apparently meant something different than it does today. While listening to  a digitized 1974 oral history, I stumbled upon an amusing recollection from Biology professor Thacher R. Gary and his wife Nawona (both also 1940 graduates of Southwest Texas State Teachers College.)

 

 

 

jessie_claude_kellam

Jessie and Claude Kellam, 1923

 

 

They recalled the hardships on students in the 1920s and 1930s and that most students worked and many could only afford one meal a day. In recalling that some would do anything to stay in school, they recount that several students had kept cows on campus in the early years, including J. C.  Kellam and his brother, and they would sell the milk to other students to help earn money.

 

 

Library Exhibit

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Digital & Web Services Exhibit

Digital & Web Services Exhibit

The Digital & Web Services Department has mounted a physical exhibit in the Alkek Library to showcase digitization at the Library. It is scheduled to be displayed from September through December 18, 2015. Located on the 1st floor of the Alkek Library and entitled From Paper to Pixels: Digitization at the Alkek Library, it uses samples from recent projects to provide a look at some of the equipment and procedures used for digitization.

Front page of the 1929 San Marcos Record

 

Included are over-sized prints including the Taffola Manuscript, the restored Sallie Beretta Painting and older issues of the school newspaper.

 

 

 

The exhibit also features a step by step photo breakdown of the dis-binding process used in preparation for scanning the Pedagogs, the student yearbook.

interferenceAlthough the title of the exhibit only mentions paper, it also features work on digitizing audio and video. Physical examples of open reel, cassette, Betacam and Hi-8 tapes are on display and screens-shots demonstrating the capture of audio are shown.

Selected photographs printed from the unlabeled negative project are also on display including a large print of Dana Jean Smith and Gloria Odoms, taken on the day Southwest Texas State College was officially integrated in February 1963.

1963-0088_02