I just finished some “behind the scenes” updated to the Northfield Historical Society site and wanted to document that process here. It was definitely a bit messy at times and quite labor intensive, but I think it was the best way to deal with the situation I faced.

Background

Starting last year, I got about 260 images from the old Northfield Historical Society site (archived here: http://www.oldsite.northfieldhistoricalsociety.org/). These images varied greatly in quality; there were a few large, high quality TIFF images but most files were small JPEGs the size of thumbnails. In order to get intellectual control over these files, I renamed them and manually formatted metadata (using Dublin Core) to create an Omeka site. This was part of my “Web Design for Organizations” class I took through GSLIS.

However, the low quality images didn’t look great online. In fact, they looked pretty bad. So I inquired if higher quality versions of the files existed somewhere else. After some searching, they were able to get higher quality images from another source. Success!

This new batch of files was a treasure trove…but also had a few problems:

1. Very different file naming conventions.
2. Included many additional photos not found in the initial ingest.
3. Did not include all the files from the initial ingest.
4. Included both TIFF and JPEG images.

So I needed to match the new files with the older set of images (keeping the highest quality image in each case) and then incorporate the new files into the file naming convention I established earlier.I used two tools that were particularly helpful in this process. One was a Batch Rename tool and the other was a Image Duplication tool. Both were extremely helpful.

Results

Here are two screenshots of the same “item” with two very different image files.

 

 

 

 

 

The improvement is hard to miss!