Digital Scholarship Lab

Teaching-centered Philosophy
We aim to teach the skills necessary to engage with digital scholarship. Therefore, we provide training, consultation, and supervision--rather than fulfill drop-off scanning requests. However, library student employees are trained on lab procedures, so if you have ideas for a project, we encourage you to reach out to the Lab to see if it's feasible!

If you would like to make a request for an ebook, digital chapter, or article, please visit the Butler Libraries homepage or reach out to your liaison librarian.

Prioritizing Scholarly Inquiry
The Digital Scholarship Lab prioritizes projects that center or support scholarly inquiry. Such projects may include but are not limited to:

• Digitizing local, community, and public history items as part of curricular activities
• Photogrammetry and 3-D modeling of unique items to provide online access to rare or fragile objects
• Digitizing materials from Special Collections, Rare Books and University Archives to broadly share Butler's unique history and holdings
• Generating quick-access, high-resolution scans for PALShare and ILL requests
• Creation of single-use accessible digital copies of print-only materials, where digital copies are unavailable or nonexistent

We encourage you to use existing Open Access, licensed, and/or controlled digital lending options before choosing to create copies of articles or book chapters for classroom use. Such requests MUST include a copyright consultation. Check out our other LibGuides for more info on these awesome (and effort-saving) resources!

Safety and Proper Use of Equipment

• Food and beverages are NOT allowed in the Digital Scholarship Lab. They can be left in your bag or placed on an empty table away from equipment and scanning materials.
• Hands must be washed and dried completely before operating equipment or handling sensitive materials.
• Please consider your attire when using the scanners to keep damage to the equipment minimal. Unsuitable attire includes:
  • Jackets with metal buttons on sleeves
  • Heavy bracelets, rings
  • Loose or dangling long-sleeve cuffs
  • Long necklaces
• Remove paperclips, staples and other materials that would scratch the glass while using the flatbed scanners. If such components cannot (or should not) be removed, use the Zeutschel Zeta scanner or the Bookeye scanner instead.
   

Handling Fragile Materials, or Materials from Special Collections and Archives

• Always follow the appropriate handling procedures as instructed by Special Collections, Rare Books, and University Archives
• Use clean and dry hands, no lotions
• Handle fragile material with care
• Vinyl gloves (provided) must be worn when handling photographs or transparent film

The Digital Scholarship Lab operates with the best practices outlined by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) in mind. The work is also informed by related materials including the Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats descriptions and Preserving (Digital) Objects With Restricted Resources (POWRR).

It is the current standard at Butler University Libraries to perform the following alterations when creating the production master image file:

• Crop to interior edge of page (instead of leaving a small border)
• Deskew along text-reading direction (to improve OCR results)
• NO color/tone/sharpness corrections

Staff are available to discuss your post-processing needs on a project-by-project basis.

Saving Your Files
Don't forget to save your files before you leave! We recommend bringing in a USB flash drive to transfer your files, but small projects can be saved locally and emailed or uploaded to your Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. To ensure enough space for the next user's project, older images and files will be periodically deleted without notice. Also, check out our tips on file organization -- see below!

General File Naming Best Practices

• Do not use spaces, because they are not recognized by some software. Instead use underscores (file_name), dashes (file-name), no separation (filename) or camelcase (FileName).
• Avoid special characters: ~ ! @ # % ^ & * ( ) ` ; < > ? , [ ] ' " . They are often not recognized by software, and you may be prevented from saving a file with special characters.
• Make file names informative. Break relevant information into chunks to give yourself an idea of what the file contains.
• Include a date, if relevant. This makes sure all your files stay in chronological order.
• Don't make file names too long; longer names are more difficult to read in a directory system and can invite reading errors. Limit file names to 25 characters or less if possible.
• For sequential numbering, use leading zeroes to ensure files sort properly. For example, use "001, 002...101, etc." instead of "1, 2...101, etc." This ensures your files stay in sequential order.
• To manage drafts and revision, include a version number in the file name.

Bad examples:

• asldkfj;(1)
• my resume
• final project final FINAL

Good Examples:

• 2023-2024_Fall_FYS101_Reading03
• LastName_CV_PositionTitle
• Thesis_LastName_v03

General Folder Organization Best Practices

While there's no right or wrong way to organize file folders on your computer, some organization can keep files easy to find, so that you don't have to rely on your computer's search function.

• Categorize your folders. Group similar files together under the same folder.
• Use subfolders to organize even more.
• Do not just leave items in your Downloads folder.

Good examples:

• Documents > 2023-2024 > Fall > FYS101 > Readings; Projects
• IR_Contents_backup > Graduate_Scholarship > Graduate Theses > 2023 > LastName01; LastName02; etc.

Digital Collections File Naming Schema

Each project is assigned a file naming schema. They will typically follow the format of:

• Acronym_CollectionName_Box#Folder#_Item#
• Acronym_CollectionName_YYYYTitle_Type
• Acronym_CollectionName_YYYY_AuthorName_Type

Examples:

• BU_JCA_1960MacBeth_Program
• BU_Thesis_1970_Smith_Thesis
• BU_Thesis_1970_Smith_License

What is DPI? What is PPI? What's the difference?

DPI stands for dots per inch, and measures resolution in printing. PPI stands for pixels per inch and measures resolution in digital images. PPI is the correct technical term when discussing resolution in a digitization context, but DPI is also used colloquially.

What is resolution and why does it matter?

Resolution (as measured by PPI) describes the level of spatial detail in a digital image (such as a JPEG or TIFF). A high resolution image shows more detail than a low resolution one. However, high resolution also results in larger file sizes. An appropriate resolution will balance capturing meaningful details and keeping file sizes manageable.

Why does suggested PPI vary based on material type?

Simply put, you need to capture more detail in some formats than others.

Think of a polaroid photograph next to a printed copy of a syllabus. If you were to scan both to refer to later, you'd probably want to zoom in and see all the little details in the photograph, whereas you might only be interested in clearly reading the words on the syllabus. That's why we'd scan the photograph at 600 ppi and the modern textual record (syllabus) at 300 ppi, unless otherwise specified.

Print materials from Special Collections, Rare Books, and University Archives are typically scanned at 400 ppi. This includes bound materials like books and looseleaf materials like pamphlets. This resolution allows us to capture details like paper texture and clear letters while not creating files that are too large. Because most of these are text-based, we don't risk losing much detail by not scanning at 600 ppi.

Why is microfilm scanned at such high resolutions? Well, it's micro! Microfilm is usually only 35mm, or just an inch or so wide. We need far more than 300, or even 600 pixels to capture those tiny details.

Lastly, these numbers come from the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Third Edition, published May 2023. See the Best Practices tab above for more information.

Quick start guides are on their way... in the meantime, if you need assistance operating the equipment in the lab, please set up a consultation via the LibCal reservation system!

Need to reliably move or copy lots of files while maintaining metadata, timestamps, permissions, etc.? You can use the windows-native command-line file copy utility, Robust File Copy (Robocopy) to move files faster and more securely than copy/paste.

For a full explanation of Robocopy's parameters, check out the article linked below.

Robocopy syntax used in the DSL

robocopy "source file path" "destination file path" /e /dcopy:t /r:10 /v /fp /tee /log:filename.log

Robocopy Steps

1. On a Windows computer, open the command prompt
   1. Press the win key or start icon
   2. Search "cmd"
   3. Click on the command prompt app
2. Type the syntax, copy/pasting your source and destination file paths inside quotation marks
   1. Create the destination folder if not done so already
3. Press enter
4. Check that all files were copied and none failed
   1. You should have one skipped directory, and zero failed directories or files. The skipped directory is the destination folder you're copying into. If you specify a folder that does not exist in your destination file path, then robocopy will create the folder in the specified location and you will not have a skipped directory in your results.