Dear Irene,
I have a word with our digitisation team, who have been involved in the
digitisation of illustrations, objects, photos and archive material for an
international project, and this is what they said:-
We see it as advisable not to make any alterations to the digital
images that might enhance it (contrast, sharpening etc.) - for two
reasons - it becomes very hard to record a series of changes in the
metadata plus, you are not really creating a digital archive if you
alter the image of the original.
For our images we specifiy the digital image should be at least
3000 pixels on the longest edge, resulting in an uncompressed tiff
which is around 50Mb in size. From these master tiff files (archival
quality) you can easily generate smaller jpegs that will be fine for
everyday use/use on the web. You need to consider storage options
forsuch large images.
We digitse in greyscale and colour, and it is preferabe to have a
colour patch in the digitsed image, plus a scale bar.
Hope this will be of some help,
Regards,
Michele Losse
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Michèle Losse
The Archives
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Richmond
Surrey TW9 3AE
Tel: +44 (0)20-8332 5417
Fax: +44 (0)20-8332 5430
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.kew.org/library/
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