Opportunities to Learn

Often the perspective of heritage science can seem opaque, with the perception of science being only for “scientists”. The fairly recent move to using the term “heritage science” is better known in Europe, but there is some confusion as to what this term encompasses. Heritage science refers to any of the multidisciplinary fields that contribute to the discovery, security, and preservation of a diverse range of cultural heritage materials. Many heritage collection items are complex multi-composites with convoluted preservation needs and degradation pathways. One of the areas that seems to be less well understood and appreciated is the capacity for heritage science to add new layers of knowledge to collection items, as well as the capacity for re-interpretation through this new information. Further areas of heritage science that support humanities include confirming provenance, the ability to link and reconnect separated collections, and the utilization of new technology to provide levels of security, an area of support greatly needed in the current environment for extensive trafficking of heritage.

Since the advent of the Digital Intermediate (DI) and the Cineon system, motion picture film preservation and restoration practices overcame an enormous change derived from the possibility of digitizing and digitally restoring film materials. Today, film materials are scanned using mostly commercial film scanners, which process the frames into the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES) and present proprietary LUTs of negative-to-positive conversions, image enhancement, and color correction.

The processing operated by scanner systems is not always openly available. The various digitization hardware and software can lead to different approaches and workflows in motion picture film preservation and restoration, resulting in inconsistency among archives and laboratories.

This work presents an overview of the main approaches and systems used to digitize and encode motion picture film frames to explain these systems' potentials and limits.

USA government agency project to design and implement a scanner to digitize wide-format film over 10” in width at a high-rate of speed.

Multispectral Imaging has become an indispensable tool for Cultural Heritage materials and objects analyzing, documenting, and visualizing. This study delves into applying this technique to an 18th-century illuminated manuscript at the Minas Gerais Public Archive, Brazil. Currently undergoing restoration intervention at The Federal University of Minas Gerais, the manuscript exhibits faded writing due to moisture, and the application of multispectral imaging (UV, Visible, and IR) with seven different wavelengths proves highly effective in recovering lost information. The light source was provided from LED and Halogen Lamp, and the result shows a very clear text on the manuscript after the digital processing by ImageJ and PCA. The Minas Gerais Public Archive, established in 1895, plays a vital role in safeguarding the state's documentary and historical heritage. It was the first-time multispectral imaging was applied to cultural objects in Minas Gerais.

This contribution describes the inspiration for, and beginning stages of, important conversations around revitalizing the way routine imaging operations and distribution procedures are carried out in support of ongoing internal object-based research projects at Getty. As part of somewhat routine technical imaging of a late-18th-century work on paper, a variety of multimodal images were captured to support the technical study of this object. The simple act of distributing this image set as a registered, layered Photoshop file enabled visual examination and comparisons of the data that would not have been possible had they been delivered as separate, unrelated files, as is the normal mode of operation for multimodal capture campaigns like this. This easy change in the delivery and utility of the delivered file, and the enthusiasm it was met with, has had a positive impact on our interdepartmental communication and has reinforced the need to carefully consider the best ways to support and meet the needs of all project stakeholders.

With this contribution, we seek to generate conversation and advice around continuing to improve our own intra-institutional collaborations with respect to multimodal data interrogation, and more broadly, building robust frameworks of communication between imaging, conservation, and science colleagues working toward common goals.

This paper will present an overview of a project to digitize the Library of Congress Hebrew Manuscripts collection, which spanned from 2021 through spring 2023. It will describe the historical/cultural importance and breadth of the collection, as well as the workflow and processes used to digitize and display the manuscripts.

The United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has issued new regulations that establish standards for the digitization of US government records. The regulations are part of an effort to transition to a fully electronic government, and allow US federal agencies the authority to digitize and destroy source records and the electronic version become the recordkeeping copy. The specifications draw upon established international digitization standards such as ISO 19264, Metamorfoze, and FADGI guidelines.

By adopting the image quality specifications found in ISO 19264 and the image analysis method described by FADGI, NARA has effectively defined the minimum requirements for a digital surrogate to serve as legal and evidentiary purpose as the source record. This paper presents the records management context of digitization, as well as discussing the quality management, documentation, image and metadata specifications, and validation requirements.

While digitization processes’ technical requirements multiply, with setups and workflows allowing ever greater throughput, the user experience for accessing high and ultra-high-resolution imagery does not advance at the same rate. This paper describes how Micrio is used by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums to deliver their high-resolution imagery to a plethora of devices. It then focuses on the evolution of storytelling formats that the project-based development of the platform has originated – starting from multimodal 2D images, to immersive environments and, finally, 360-degree views on heritage objects.

At the Archiving 2011 Conference a paper was presented titled, “How Long Is Long-Term Data Storage?”, in which the author summarized the state of archival digital data storage. This paper covered causes of failure, the life expectancy of the data with the storage methods available at the time, format obsolescence, and current research into archival storage. With that paper being about 13 years old now, it is time for an update. This paper will discuss the same topics covered in the previous work, including failure, life expectancy, format obsolescence, as well as current research in all 4 of the primary data storage methods used today (hard-disk drives, solid-state drives or flash memory, optical discs, and ½” magnetic tape. It ends with a discussion of our current research on a human-readable, high-density storage medium.

Amidst the challenges of a global pandemic, Holocaust Museum LA redefined their traditional model of an internship in the Archive, creating a virtual program with lessons learned in remote collaboration. Beyond the hurdles of diverse time zones and required skill sets, this initiative significantly increased the team’s capacity. With standardized processes and meticulous quality checks, interns worldwide contribute to processing and cataloging museum collections. Looking ahead, their work lays the foundation for a public-facing database for the collection, elevating accessibility and fulfilling our core archival mission.

The accurate digitization of film using high-resolution digital cameras, especially historic positive and negative film, presents a difficult challenge for cultural-heritage imaging. Approaches used for reflecting materials—e.g., profiling using color targets—are difficult to apply to transparent materials due to a paucity of film-specific targets, measurement challenges of small patch sizes, and the inadequacy of these targets for historical films and negatives. Research was carried out to design, construct, and verify a new transmission target. Simulation was used to select 80 filters, optimized from a 476-filter set of absorption filters with criteria including colorimetric performance for the 80 filters and four validation spectral datasets, color gamut, and spectral diversity. A prototype target was constructed, measured, and imaged. All criteria were met. Future research will refine the target and validate its performance using independent targets and color-challenging photographs.

Color accuracy is essential in digital imaging for Cultural Heritage when reproducing an object into digital format. As a practitioner in the field, curiosity rose as to what the long-term effects are of working in a low-light environment after chronic fatigue and strained eyes became the daily norm. Multiple literatures were reviewed to extract the groundwork of color vision in low light and what achieves proper and consistent information processing; however, there were no known specific studies for the impetus for this topic. This research aims to explore color vision in low light to recognize potential short- and long-term physiological vision changes. Studies uncovered multiple variables impact human vision when processing an image or scene. This paper investigates the structure of the eye by comparing human vision to the structure of a camera system, the processing of color in the retina, the recommended viewing environment for cultural heritage capture, different conditions that impact perception, and solutions for regular eye maintenance. As is often said, awareness is the first step to prevention.

Beyond RGB is a recently developed software application for colorimetric and spectral processing. Two sets of RAW RGB images (a dark current image, a flatfield, target, and artwork), taken under two different lighting conditions are used as the inputs. After processing, the software provides a color calibrated RGB image, along with the calibration accuracy, a spectral stack, and if applicable estimated spectral reflectance of regions of interest may be selected. The updates for this version of the software includes: dual screens for simultaneous file comparisons, updated a*b* and L*C* plots showing the actual and expected values, batch processing, meta data allowing for precision reproducibility for color calibration, and user interface upgrades.

Advancements in accurate digitization of 3D objects through photogrammetry are ongoing in the cultural heritage space, for the purposes of digital archival and worldwide access. This paper outlines and documents several user-driven enhancements to the photogrammetry pipeline to improve the fidelity of digitizations. In particular, we introduce a new platform for capturing empirically-based specularity of 3D models called Kintsugi 3D, and visually compare traditional photogrammetry results with this new technique. Kintsugi 3D is a free and open-source package that features, among other things, the ability to generate a set of textures for a 3D model, including normal and specularity maps, based empirically on ground-truth observations from a flash-on-camera image set. It is hoped that the ongoing development of Kintsugi 3D will improve public access for institutions with an interest in sharing high-fidelity photogrammetry.

Selecting the optimal resolution and post-processing techniques of 3D objects for cultural heritage documentation is one of the most distinguishable challenges within 3D imaging. Many techniques exist to document a tangible object at very high objective accuracy, but there also exist techniques that can visualize a similar perceptual accuracy without documenting the objective values. The application difference between storage of complex geometric data and the visualization of it could be fundamentally different, and if the two methods are not disassociated it could lead to either false or inaccurate digital documentation of a cultural heritage object. In this investigation we compare several different metrics for evaluating the quality of a 3D object, both objectively and perceptually, and look at how the different approaches might report greatly different outputs based on the post-processing of a 3D object. We also provide some insight in how to interpret the output of various metrics, and how to compare them.