KSV News: Short Round 029

Digitizing All Red Clay Magazines- The Saga Continues

In Short Round edition # 028, we discussed how, after Tommy’s passing, we were able to collect all of the Red Clay publications EVER produced.

So……… now we had them all in one place / pile. What to do next?

It became painfully obvious that having a pile of old paper magazines in cardboard boxes was not going to make much of an impact in tomorrow’s universe. And our pile of paper Red Clay copies definitely would not be be readily accessible, not only to our members and their families, but to future historians and the rest of the universe.

So, next on our very long “honey do” list was trying to get all of these physical / paper copies captured into some sort of digital format that would endure beyond the paper. Where to begin?

After months of searching, I stumbled on a wonderful company in Maryland only 25 miles from my home. That was archSCAN, LLC, whose president Vivica Williams was, from the get-go, incredibly supportive of our efforts and the project. Their company makes a living changing paper documents into electronic records. Mostly for federal, state and local governments. They were an incredibly lucky find for us. Especially since we were not a large volume government entity. Having military family members, Vivica took us under her incredibly talented wing for the mission.

So…. Bill Ring ships all of our cardboard boxed magazines to me in Northern Virginia. This is the most frightening part of the project because who knows what happens with FedEx boxes in transit? And how could we ever replace this collection!

But they are received unharmed in Northern Virginia with no damage. Next day, I take the one hour trip (on a good day with DC traffic) to Columbia, Maryland to meet with archSCAN to do the handoff to our Red Clay’s new afterlife.

As promised, during the next couple of weeks:

– ArchSCAN inventories and records our hundreds of Red Clay magazines and documents

– They professionally machine cut the spine on each publication so they can be machine scanned, ending up with thousands of flat pages and covers.

– Then they put these through their ginormous scanner that captures every letter and photo flawlessly.

– Their electronically capture pages / images are saved at a high digital resolution of greater than 300dpi. At this resolution, the files support high quality future image reproduction.

– When the scanning was completed and proofed, our individual magazines were then placed into new plastic “clamp” covers that hold them together as if they were brand, spanking, just off the press, new. This makes our physical copies ready for future, prime time, hard copy reading.

So, what we get back from archScan are all of our original magazines and articles with new exterior covers- better than how they started.

And, priceless, we receive two physically tiny, but with very large digital capacity, thumb drives. With zillions of giga somethings that are the digital versions of all our Red Clay magazines and related documents. Holding the thumb drives next to the boxes of original Red Clay documents is a Zen moment. The digital versions will outlive the physical copies by hundreds pf years. Thank you archSCAN!!! Whodda thought???

So, now we have both the physical and the digital copies representing decades of hard creative and editorial work that created the Red Clay collection.

Now what???

Bob Koury: Website & Digital Manager