Fun With Digitization

Ok, hopefully I’ll actually be here tomorrow to talk about this post (stupid sicknesses).

So digitization for my site. I gots me some ideas for it.

When it comes to actually constructing my site, there will only really be digitization for my photo files and videos. Photos will be of the objects that I will describe on my website. I just decided that I’m going to hire a firm to do this, because it’s so time consuming and there are lots of things that can go wrong. You get just a few bits in a file wrong, and it won’t work. PERIOD. So I need a company to do this for me. But I’ve got some guidelines that I’d want followed.

1) I want to have Tiff files of every image going into my database to store just in case something goes wrong and I need to replace them.

2) Files on the actual site will be in JPEG format, because they will take up less room on the server and will still be nice and clear to use.

3) I want my photos to be 24 bit color. Black and white just won’t cut it on this website at all for me.

4) I’m going to use Quicktime for the videos that will be used to describe how objects are used in the current day, and I will also use this for the language section, because I plan to just have videos for the language sessions as well.

5) What I’d like to do is take photos of the objects myself, and I’d use a digital cameras and turn over all the photos to whatever company that I use to encode them for the website. This will allow me to have my own copies of them, especially when I or others would be doing write-ups of the objects and artifacts in the database for the servers.

6) I’d like to use XML format when coding any items for the site, because I’ve heard over and over again how simple it is to use. But I guess that would be up to the company that would be coding everything for the website.

I guess the quality control would be up to the company’s standards. It’s another reason why I’d like to use one for coding of the site. I just know I’d mess it up somewhere along the way, haha. We all know, like I said earlier, that in coding, even 95% accuracy will show up in serious errors. Files might not work at all, or there might be typos or other discreptancies that might be hard to find and could hurt the integrity of the site itself. So I don;t want that to happen, so I’d be willing, if this is an exercise in something I’d want, to pay the money to make this happen.

So preservation. This is something I need to talk about in class. I know I need to have a backup. I’ll probably have two…in different locations. Should they be on different servers, or should I just buy two different external hard drives that can be one Terabyte each to store all this information on so that if something happens I can grab one and somehow get the information to a server to quickly get the site back up and running? Also, I plan on frequently updating my Quicktime files so that they can keep being used in the future. I’d like the developers of the code to use good documentation when creating it so that in the future if an issue comes up I and others I will have help me to either fix the code, update it, or write entirely new code will know exactly the particulars of how the website’s code was written and why. I have the feeling I’d be a pretty demanding customer for whatever firm I hire to create the code and digitize my videos and phot files, but whatever, they’ll live. I like the idea of using a README file like the book said in chapter 8 (pg 231) to write notes on when I might have added a search engine, or when I uploaded photos or had code written, etc, so I can keep a good file of the website’s production and maintenance. Finally, I am confident my site would be around for a long time because it would be the home website of an entire American Indian nation. I’d hope that they would either have the $ to keep it running or we would try to have an institution take care of it, like a local university, a state government, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Who knows. But that would obviously be the ideal for this website.

Lets move on to GoogleBooks and Open Library. I dislike both sites. I didn’t really find what I was looking for in them. I did 2 searches. The first was of Brave New World. GoogleBooks let me see a limited preview only. Open Library had nothign on it. Then I tried 1984. GoogleBooks also only had a limited preview, and open Library said it had a full text version for me to read, but when I clicked on the link got an error message, so I couldn’t read it. I think Ill just stick with going to a real library for another 5 years before I trust this technology. Sorry if that sounds snarky, but I didn’t have a very good experience with the sites, and after trying for 10 minutes on each, I lost my patience.  Though GoogleBooks looks prettier as a website.

All right, hope that made sense to you all. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.