Minnesota Local History

Many historical Societies and archives find themselves with hundreds if not thousands of slides and negatives in their collections often with little or no description of what is on each of them. From a preservation standpoint color slides and negatives will suffer from deterioration over time, especially pre-1978 where slides and negatives which where made with comparatively unstable films and unlike prints, slides can be very difficult to notice fading or deterioration without the aid of a projector or light box and negatives are impossible to tell how much fading has occurred.

In order to provide better access, get a better idea of what is in a collection and  to better preserve images on fading and deteriorating film it is important to digitally scan slides and negatives and to add the proper metadata.

It's never too soon to start preserving your slides and photos, and in some cases it may already be too late.

Conditions you can find slides and negatives even if they have been in unopened boxes or untouched sleeves:

• Slides and negatives which are stuck to their sleeves


• Snowflake crystal-like artifacts on film


• Film developed by drugstore-type services, fading very badly, where the same type of film processed at the same time by different vendors can be fine


• Dark Fading or Light Fading (see below)

Clean Before Scanning

Microscopic specs of dust become boulders and tiny hairs become tree limbs when scanned at 2400 dpi. Newer scanners can use technology to "remove" the dust scanned on with the image. However the dust is not actually removed rather it is modifying the image to hide the dust. Dust and dirt ideally should be removed before scanning.

• Wear surgical gloves when handling negatives or slides. Even if finger prints are not visible grease from fingers can cause problems years down the line.


• To remove simple dust before scanning clean using compressed air, an antistatic brush, and careful attention.


• For slides with serious problems like finger prints use Pec-12 and Pec Pads.


• The best solution would be to never get the slides dirty and with careful storage dust and damage can be mitigated. However even slides that have never left their box or envelope seem to accumulate dust.

Flatbed Scanner or Dedicated Slide Scanner?

As recent as a few years ago there was a great difference in quality from a dedicated slide scanner  versus a flat bed scanner with a slide scanner attachment. However, quality of what you can get from a flat bed scanner with a slide scanner attachment has improved to the point that most are buying flatbed slide/negative scanner combinations and many slide scanner producers like Nikon have simply stopped making dedicated slide scanners. The other nice thing is that with the increase in quality there has been a corresponding significant drop in price of scanners. There still is at least a couple of companies still making slide/negative scanners and if you have hundreds or thousands of slides and negatives or are dealing with professionally taken/processed slides and negatives it would be a worthwhile expense (currently around $400) to purchase a dedicated slide/negative scanner.

One advantage of a flatbed slide/negative scanner combination is that not all negatives are 35mm and many can scan a large variety of sizes of transparencies. However you have to do the research to see just what each model supports.

While a flatbed slide/negative scanner combination is acceptable, other scanners are not. Document scanners, Microfilm Reader/Scanners and the all-in-one copier/scanner/faxing machines  either lack the resolution, the optics or both for doing archival quality scans.

Another issue is the age of the scanner. Like computers, scanners have improved to a point both in quality and price that it is really worth looking at retiring an older working scanner. The example on the left below comes from the Minnesota Historical Society's own scanner in the SHPO office. The scanner was purchased in 2001 and still works very well. However, the highest DPI is 2400 which is inadequate for many 35mm slides and the optics are far from perfect when compared to a newer 2011 model scanning at the same DPI.

2001 Flatbed Scanner detail-2400dpi		2011 Flatbed Scanner detail-2400dpi

Dark Fading | Light Fading

Remember that resolution isn't everything. Color and contrast are equally important and dealing with older slides and negatives you will run into the issue of fading. Slides and photos will fade for a variety of reasons. All dyes have a limited lifetime because they break down because of temperature, light and chemical reactions to materials within the dyes themselves.

Dyes that fade when they are in the dark is termed "Dark Fading" and dyes that fade because they are exposed to light  is termed "Light Fading.

Light fading is caused by exposure to high intensity light such as when a slide is shown in a slide projector. Magenta dyes will typically fade the quickest.

Dark Fading occurs when your slides are not exposed to light. It is caused by a temperature and relative humidity reaction. Cyan dyes will typically fade more quickly. Prior to the mid-1980s, the Cyan dye was particularly unstable. BTW:  It is important to understand that Dark fading is not caused by darkness, Dark fading simply refers to the fading and staining that take place in a color material during storage when light is not present.

Digitally Fixing Fading

Improvements in software have made color and contrast correction remarkably easy with "auto correction" tools with are often available with the scanning software. However, true color correction and digital restoration is both and art and a science, to get the best possible results  hire a professional with experience in color correction and digital restoration.

NOTE: It is important to understand that your unmodified raw scanned image is your master image. Contrast or color corrections to the image will make it a derivative of the master image since correcting the image introduces changes that are subjective AND unreversable. However if the image needs major correcting it is acceptable to archive a corrected derivative to along with the unmodified master image so it can be used to create further derivatives.

Slide and Negative Preservation

Since negatives and slides are original source information it is important to keep them as long as they remain a viable source. With proper care and storage certain filmstocks can store unchanged for decades.  Unfortunately film preservation is out of the scope of this article. However Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc. has extensive articles on slide and negative preservation. Founders Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower Wilhelm literally wrote the book on slide and negative preservation.

Additional Resources

• Digital Imaging For Small Organizations (PDF)


• Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grants -  Digital Conversion In-House Guidelines


• Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grants -  Digital Conversion Services Guidelines


• Minnesota Digital Library


• Book - Digital Restoration from Start to Finish
  

Working in local history usually makes me reluctant to speculate on the future. "I'm a historian," I will tell people when asked to guess what might happen. "Not a prognosticator." However, being conscious the future is vital for any business, for-profit or nonprofit or government.

Internally the Minnesota Historical Society has been estimating challenges it faces going forward, which it periodically does and is good to do. This activity prompted me to think about what local historical organizations may need to consider going forward. I presented a session on this in 2009, and little has changed since then. Essentially there seems to be five compelling issues that need to be addressed, and soon.

1. Mission-based presence. Most organizations have a geography to their mission, whether a county, a city, or whatever. Even those that don't have a geographical focus do have a mission focus. Whatever the focus the organization dedicated to a specific history needs to consider what its presence has to look like in order to be successful. The cost of communication through traditional means continues to increase, while newer media is not always accepted by our main supporters. What can you do to continue to have a strong presence in your mission focus? We simply cannot afford to hole-up in our facilities. Leadership is all about putting yourself on the line, and to do so you have to be an active member of whatever community for whose history you are responsible.

2. 21st-century user expectations for products. Every concern needs to reconsider what it offers from the perspective of the user. Peter Drucker, a renowned management thinker, spoke of this as adopting an "outside-in" view of your company. Too many history organizations tend to think of things from the inside-out: how can we organize better in order to be more efficient? The trouble is that if no one desires what you efficiently offer (even though "they should"), you risk becoming irrelevant. What is it that people who use your current services want? What do nonusers and especially newer residents need and can you offer that? Do you know?

3. Developing knowledge workers for history organizations. The economy and demographics are changing. As historical organizations we preserve the memory of why and how things have changed, so that these are changing is good news because that means more to document. The economy is often said to be changing over from an industrial "make stuff" model to a knowledge-based "know stuff" model. The machinery of the economy then is increasingly in the heads of workers rather than on a factory floor. In a sense history organizations have always been in the so-called new economy of knowledge workers, since history organizations preserve and provide knowledge. For once, we may be ahead of the curve. However, a trend of knowledge workers is to more frequently change jobs. No longer does a worker put in 40 years on the assembly line. The expectation is to move frequently. With the steeper learning curve of knowledge work, what does job-migration mean for the way we recruit and train workers? As to demographics and the browning of Minnesota, equipping non-Whites for work in local history is imperative in order to assure continuance of local history organizations. Further, for organizations in more rural areas, we need to be part of the solution to depopulation by demonstrating to the youth how it is possible to live and make a living without relocating to a larger population area. Too often those in rural areas apologize for not having something or being better than they. Having grown up in a town of less than 2,000 people at the time, it is tempting to think this way at times and I certainly did not stay (In my defense, my parents moved us to Arlington when I was 10, and today I live in a house that belonged to my great uncle. So, in a sense history does keep me where I live). Resist the temptation to think negatively about size because you can't build on scarcity, only on what you have. Besides, there are a surplus of great reasons to choose to live in any of the 850+ cities or 1,700+ townships across the state. Local history should be able to document why.

4. Shift to project-based budgets. Over time philanthropy has shifted from funding bricks-and-mortar projects to funding programmatic offerings, and now it seems that the shift from general operations to project-based grants is here to stay. That means the savvy manager has to create flexibility in the fiscal budget, often with employees left hanging in the balance of phrases like "Position subject to renewal contingent on funding." So, not only do we have to worry about the knowledge worker leaving for greener pastures but also about our pasture drying up. Still funding mission is very possible for those willing to put in additional effort to "projectize" elements of the workplan to free up general support for tasks that may not be grant-worthy. A number of local history organizations have done this for collections-related initiatives like inventory, catalog, and backlog reduction. Still, we should be asking, "how can an organization remain diligent through the intentional application of resources to problems if funding is so seemingly opportunistic and uncertain?" Time will tell, but for the moment I know grappling with project-based budgets has to be perplexing and exhausting.

5. Evidence and access for the 21st century. In rethinking all that we do, the questions of what to collect, how much to collect, and how will we make what we collect accessible, all need to be on the table. Some local history organizations have taken the extreme, though perhaps necessary, step of a collecting moratorium until they have solid answers for these questions. In a time when the common expectation for access is 24/7 and from anywhere in the world, how do local history organizations that are inherently tied to the physical address the virtual? Although space for digital assets seems endless, it isn't. Think of digitization as a way to expand your storage, but remember that this too is not infinite, because nothing is infinite. The boundaries are costs in terms of time, money, and opportunity. The opportunity cost is that for whatever you do, there is now something you cannot do. Returning to the public repeatedly to seek funds for more space is something to be mindful about, whether for a building or for electronic capacity. Collectively we as a field need to figure out how to reduce the pace of space consumption before we fatigue our supporters.

Quite a few history organizations are very good at these points already. Too many, however, are locked into patterns established long ago. Those patterns were probably quite appropriate at one time. With more than one million nonprofits currently in the U.S., and the promise of an additional 12 million more to come as Boomers retire, the targets for charitable giving will increase the competition for finite funding. If local history nonprofits do not have the courage to meet the 21st century on its own terms, they should not expect to be competitive.

However, the inherent purposes of local history wedded with adaptations for the 21st century should make local history nearly unbeatable as a worthy recipient of funding. People are most often self-centered. They want to see themselves in your exhibits and programs and publications. They want to know what's in it for them. Yes, a great many try to overcome their self-absorption, which is what we all should strive to do, but in the end we are still naturally interested in ourselves. Local history in its current form was started to help people in the present (often veterans) and to document the present for the future. Local history is all about us, which at the core should keep local history quite relevant. Thus, if you can ask yourself in light of the five challenges above, "How will we help our neighbors?" and "What should we tell the future about our neighbors?" - local history should remain competitive by remaining true to our purposes.

We'd love to hear from anyone with examples of how they are addressing any of the issues above.

Minnesota Historical Society Executive Director Steve Elliott, delivers the keynote address at the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museum's well-attended annual meeting Friday, October 28, 2011 at the Stearns History Museum.

FYI: This was filmed with an iPhone with a mic adapter.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 35:35 — 409.7MB)

The Saint Louis County Historical Society used MHCG funds to provide appropriate storage for the nationally significant ethnographic Eastman Johnson collection.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 0:45 — 19.0MB)