Date: Thursday 14 May, 2020
Time: 12:45 - 15:00 EDT (2 hours)
Track: Standards and Best Practices
Level: Introductory
Instructors: Fenella G. France and Meghan Wilson

Benefits: This course will benefit participants interested in expanding their digitization capabilities through the integration of spectral imaging to understand whether this might be a useful tool for their institution and collections. Participants will gain skills to focus on best practice, standardized procedures, and effective digital spectral project planning, including:

• Understand and assess imaging systems and illumination modalities (reflected, side-lighting, transmitted) to best meet the needs of specific collection materials
• Integrate the priorities of scholars, curators, and researchers in digital projects
• Manage large datasets and metadata
• Assess benefits of spectral imaging in relation to specific research questions

Course Description
Digital studies of cultural heritage collection materials are moving beyond simple RGB image capture to include multispectral imaging. These non-invasive imaging systems provide specialists and researchers with a tool that can reveal hidden information and additional useful data that enables a deeper understanding of collections. The incorporation of a multispectral imaging workflow allows recovery of erased or obscured writing, exposure of important provenance features such as watermarks, the identification of inks and colorants, and provides a means for in-depth analysis of creation techniques and material characteristics. These features are important for scholars, authentication, “fingerprinting”, and the care of collections.

This course will examine the connections between non-invasive spectral imaging techniques and the cultural, societal, and provenance information contained within original sources that is not captured in base digitization. Students will be introduced to the range of types of spectral imaging that can be undertaken to explore unknown information hidden within the original source material.

Intended Audience: This course will support a wide range of professionals who work on or are planning to work on collaborative, multidisciplinary projects that would benefit from spectral imaging. These include preservation professionals and scholars; scientists and engineers; digital specialists, database administrators; program managers and directors; archivists, curators, librarians and researchers.

Fenella G. France, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division, develops non-destructive imaging techniques for collections. Her focus is spectral imaging and processing techniques to increase links between scientific and scholarly data. She received her PhD from Otago University, New Zealand, and has worked internationally on many heritage projects. She serves on a range of professional committees, collaborating with colleagues from academic, cultural, forensic, and federal institutions. She is currently a distinguished presidential fellow for CLIR.

Meghan Wilson is a preservation science specialist in the Preservation Research and Testing Division at the Library of Congress with a degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has worked extensively on multiple spectral imaging programs around the world and specializes in operation, training, quality control, and data management of this imaging technology.