• There is a tremendous variation in the weights and thicknesses of available substrates. The lightest paper we carry is Moab’s Japanese Washi Unryu translucent mulberry paper at 55 g/sm, while Hahnemühle’s Photo Rag 500 weighs in at, well, 500 g/sm — pretty much a heavy-duty cotton rag cardstock.
• The presence of (or lack thereof) of Optical Brightening Agents, or OBAs, is readily visible in each substrate’s swatch. “Natural” papers appear gray in the screen; those with OBAs appear to take on a purplish hue. The more purple the appearance of the swatch, the brighter-white the substrate and the higher the OBA content.

We’ll be continuing to add to and maintain this database, and enhance its capabilities to allow for even more powerful filtering and sorting. In the meantime, your feedback is appreciated.

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

We are pleased to be an official sponsor of the LYRASIS 2011 Annual Member Meeting.  We’re now in the second year of our partnership with LYRASIS, whose Mass Digitization Collaborative Program has allowed us to deliver terabytes of data and millions of files digitized from microfilm to LYRASIS member institutions nationwide.  Now more than ever, it’s critical that libraries make the most of their resources, and LYRASIS helps them do just that.

eGathering 2011: the LYRASIS Annual Member Meeting
Attend either online or in-person
Date: November 9
Time: 1:30 – 4:00 p.m. ET
Cost: FREE
Place: Members can attend either online or in-person at one of six Member Community Site locations or host a group at their location – Click here for more information

Don’t miss it!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

This price reduction is the result of new improvements to our scanning technology and workflow which allow us to process microfilm more efficiently; hence, we’re able to pass some of these savings onto our customers while keeping quality at the highest levels possible. Creekside Digital QA’s and guarantees 100% of the images we ship, with no exceptions — including our Small Microfilm Orders at this new reduced pricing.

Happy Halloween!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

I wanted to pass along this email from one of our new fine art reproduction customers, with her permission:

Hello Jim:

I just received the 8×10 proof “Lakeside Chapel.”  I cannot tell you how very pleased I am, except to say I am overjoyed with the job you guys did!  This is the quality of work I have been looking for for the past 6 months to no avail.

I am so happy I found your website.  Thank you so very much.

We scanned her original 20×24 oil painting using our BetterLight Super 8k system, color-matched it to near perfection, and printed / sealed  a proof to canvas media for her.  Now we’re in the process of printing several full-size and smaller prints of the work, and she’s getting ready to send us additional (larger) paintings.  Pictures soon!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

Rolling liquid laminate onto canvas

Greetings:

It’s another hot summer day here in Glen Arm: 97 degrees and rainforest-like. We have two larger microfilm digitization jobs which we’re currently seeing through, both of which should be ready to ship by next week.  I spent part of today hiding inside in the AC, revising and refitting a lot of the content on our website. Most noticeably, check out the new Frequently Asked Questions section in the navigation area. It’s got new FAQs for Book / Newspaper / Photo Scanning and Fine Art Scanning which are live right now, and others which will be up in the next few days. Essentially, we want to preload the answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about our services, and this is a great way to do it.

Finished 18x24 premium gallery wrap, ready to hang

On the giclée printing side of the house, as first seen on our Facebook page, we’re currently running a summer special for our artists and photographers: for a limited time, 18″x24″ premium gallery wraps on Breathing Color’s Lyve canvas, sealed with Breathing Color’s Timeless UV laminate, are just $99 plus shipping. This is a fabulous deal using some of the highest quality materials available today, for true museum-quality fine art printing. Here’s the way it works: you can send us your images via this link. We recommend selecting image files with a minimum resolution of 3,150 x 4,200 pixels to guarantee sharp, quality printing at this size, and we prefer to receive uncompressed TIFFs; but we’ll accept high-quality JPEGs and PSDs too. We’ll print your images out on Lyve canvas, and mirror the edges of the image in Photoshop so that when the canvas is wrapped and stretched onto the stretcher bars, the image continues around the sides of the wooden frame. Before we stretch the canvas, we’ll seal it with the Timeless product as shown above.  Timeless is a premium liquid laminate (gloss or matte finish) which adds a degree of UV and scuff resistance while increasing color saturation and keeping the thin coat of pigment ink from cracking off of the canvas when it’s stretched. Finally, we precisely stretch the sealed canvas onto a wooden frame. The result is a beautiful piece of artwork, ready to hang and enjoy for years to come.

Enjoy the rest of the summer!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

Today, LYRASIS, the United States’ largest regional membership organization serving libraries and information professionals, announced that it has expanded its relationship with Creekside Digital to include preservation-quality digitization of microfiche scanning services as well as additional microform content (such as manuscript collections) to LYRASIS members through the Mass Digitization Collaborative. Here is an excerpt from the press release (full press release on the LYRASIS site here):

LYRASIS to Expand the Mass Digitization Collaborative with New Services

Atlanta, GA, — June 17, 2011 — LYRASIS is excited to announce the expansion of its Mass Digitization Collaborative through partnership with Digital Conversion Solutions (DCS), a division of The HF Group, as well as an expansion of the existing partnership with Creekside Digital.

Previously, the Mass Digitization Collaborative offered LYRASIS members the opportunity to digitize books, serials and microfilmed newspapers for a low fee. “Based on input from our Digital & Preservation Services Advisory Group, we are in the process of completing contracts that allow us to expand the Collaborative to offer new and different formats,” stated Robin Dale, Director of Digital & Preservation Services.

(…)

Based on positive feedback from members, LYRASIS has also expanded their partnership with Creekside Digital, specialists in document and microfilm digitization, to offer preservation-quality microfiche scanning services to members. “After successfully delivering terabytes of preservation-quality images and millions of files to LYRASIS members over the past year, Creekside Digital is pleased to assist in the expansion of the Mass Digitization Collaborative program. The inclusion of content beyond books and newspapers, as well as the eligibility of multiple formats of microfiche, means that we will be able to help even more member institutions convert a higher percentage of the microfilm in their holdings,” stated Jim Studnicki, President, Creekside Digital.

As a result of the expansion in formats, some of the new services will not be eligible for Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant-subsidized pricing. “We have been able to negotiate very favorable terms with expert service providers for content that falls outside of our Sloan Foundation grant,” added Laurie Gemmill, Mass Digitization Program Manager. “The expansion of the content scope will allow members more options for digitization and additionally, members will have exclusive control over how they make their content available. We’re excited about these new possibilities for our members.”

For more information about the Mass Digitization Collaborative, please contact Laurie Gemmill. Additionally, Robin Dale and Laurie Gemmill will be available to discuss these new services in the LYRASIS Booth #959 at ALA on Saturday, June 25 and Sunday, June 26.

About LYRASIS

Created in April 2009 by the merger of PALINET and SOLINET and joined shortly thereafter by NELINET, LYRASIS is the nation’s largest regional, non-profit membership organization serving libraries and information professionals – providing opportunities for networking and collaboration, offering innovative solutions and delivering significant cost savings through group purchasing for products and services. For more information, please visit www.lyrasis.org.

About Creekside Digital

Founded in 2006, Creekside Digital of Glen Arm, MD specializes in providing archival-quality digitization of microfilm, bound and oversized books, maps, newspapers, and fine artwork, as well as on-site large format photography for libraries, archives, and museums. For more information, visit www.creeksidedigital.com.

# # #

Creekside’s Take on the Announcement

The expansion of our partnership with LYRASIS allows LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative participants to convert microfiche in addition to rollfilm. The following types of microfiche are eligible:

• Step and Repeat
• Jacketed Fiche
• COM

All microfiche digitization will be performed at 300dpi true optical resolution to 8-bit uncompressed TIFF archival master files. Program participants also receive three derivative files for each frame scanned, including JPEG2000, searchable PDF, and plain text containing the OCR engine’s raw output.

Also, non-Sloan eligible microform materials may now be scanned through the program, including manuscript collections and other types of content besides books and newspapers on rollfilm.

For questions regarding pricing, project procedures, LYRASIS membership, the Mass Digitization Collaborative, etc., please contact Laurie Gemmill, Mass Digitization Program Manager for LYRASIS, at 800-233-3401 x2908, or email her at laurie.gemmill@lyrasis.org.

For questions of a more technical nature regarding the microfilm digitization process, please contact Creekside Digital.

Using the Pocahontas Times Digital Archives

Greetings!  It seems like we skipped spring and went straight to summer here in Glen Arm.  Baltimore tied the record at 98 degrees yesterday, and today will be almost that warm.

There’s a lot going on here.  We’re working on several larger microfilm scanning projects right now, with a lot of smaller microfilm and non-microfilm projects going in and out of the shop.  One of our customers, the Pocahontas County Historical Society, just published a great article about their completed project, which is a really good read.  The search mechanism to which they refer is an implementation of Adobe FullText Indexes, and it’s a great solution for inexpensive in-house keyword search capabilities without requiring any extra software (or even an Internet connection).

Also, we’re attending the annual BetterLight Owners Conference in San Carlos, CA this week . . . pretty much the center of the universe for all things related to digital scanning backs!  Of course, Creekside Digital has a BetterLight Super 8K system which we use for the imaging of cultural heritage projects as well as for our high-quality fine art reproduction services.

More soon!

Essentially, this was a quality-driven decision for us. The halogen bulbs tend to cause hotspotting in the middle of the image, an effect which is particularly noticeable on larger positive frames (such as the ubiquitous 35mm newspaper diazo readers found in nearly every public library nationwide, which represent a lot of the film that we process). Well . . . that issue is gone thanks to the Lumintec lighting.

It’s a night-and-day upgrade — lots more light (critical at higher reduction ratios, where the camera is physically more distant from the film) which lets us run stopped-down when appropriate, more even illumination, no heat, 1/10th the power consumption of hot lights (yes . . . we’re green!), sharper images and less blurring due to the strobing, no chance of lamp failure (changing the bulb was previously a rather labor-intensive operation and represented real down-time) , and, well, it just looks cool when it’s on. Our microfilm customers will see an immediate improvement to the quality of their images.

Obligatory NextScan white paper at:

http://www.nextscan.com/products/documents/LuminTecWhitePaper.pdf

Pics soon!

"Agitate-Agitate-Agitate" by Arvie Smith, imaged by Chris Becker for the Maryland Historical Society.

Creekside Digital is proud to introduce our Fine Art Capture and Giclée Printmaking services.  At our Glen Arm, Maryland location or onsite at your gallery, museum or studio, we provide the highest quality fine art digitization and reproduction services available today, for a very reasonable price.  From artists who desire to sell multiple copies of their oil paintings, watercolors, and other original artwork, to museums and galleries seeking to preserve and / or monetize their collections, Creekside Digital can help.

Creekside Digital uses the BetterLight digital scanning back system.  But out of all the technologies available today, why choose this platform?  For one, it allows us to make use of the finest large format optics available today — big, expensive German lenses from Schneider and Rodenstock that are optimized specifically for this kind of high-resolution, flat-field copy work.  Second, BetterLight’s color-matching capabilities are only equaled by the Cruse family of scanners — but those machines only allow for overhead (vertical) imaging, so they aren’t appropriate for sagging canvas, very thick or three-dimensional items, artwork which can’t lay down flat / horizontally, etc.  Because it’s compatible with any 4×5 view camera / lens, the BetterLight system gives us infinitely more flexibility and allows us to shoot not only 2D artwork, but sculpture, historic items / artifacts, products, tapestries, architecture, you name it.  Finally, its pixel count is unequaled, even by the most recent medium format digital backs from Phase One.  If extremely high resolution and color accuracy are required, the decision is pretty easy.

In addition to the capture itself — which is responsible for 90% of the effort that goes into making a great image — we use HP’s latest 12-color pigment ink printer technology.  This allows us to create museum-quality reproductions on photo paper, watercolor paper and cotton rag, matte lithograph paper, canvas, and a variety of other art media, and ship them anywhere in the world.

Of course, having the right equipment is only part of the solution.  You need an experienced, skilled large format photographer who knows how to use it, and make the most of its capabilities.  Chris Becker is Creekside’s on-staff photographer, and he’s spent his entire career performing this type of work.  Prior to joining Creekside, Chris worked for the Maryland Historical Society, where he imaged many priceless paintings, artifacts, and historic documents and manuscripts.  Chris is well-versed in how to handle, illuminate, and digitize fine artwork, and we’re thrilled to offer his talents to our customers via our new Fine Art Reproduction services!