Wonderfully diverse and occasionally complicated, scrapbooks are considered messy treasures of archival collections. Scrapbooking is a centuries-old practice with surviving works dating back as early as the 15th century. These pieces feature many different types of materials, methods, and perspectives. However, the very thing that makes these resources incredible to study is what also causes them to be complicated when making them discoverable: that is, that anyone could make them with anything that they had on hand.
Tipped-in materials, acidic and brittle newsprint, aging adhesives, and organic materials; if you wanted to fashion the manifestation of a preservationist’s nightmare, you’d need only look so far as a scrapbook. Digitization is typically the best method for capturing each page when there is a concern that the scrapbook is, or will soon be, deteriorating. Not only does this prevent further handling by researchers, but archival digital images also provide new access points.
However, that is not to pretend that digitizing a scrapbook is easy. We consulted with our resident scrapbook digitization expert, Jeannise Rodriguez, to learn more about the challenges unique to working with these materials and how one may overcome them.
Digitization Obstacles and Solutions
Each challenge has a solution. Let’s run through some of the common ones.
Scrapbooks can have bulky bindings, or spines that are falling apart altogether.
This is frequently due to the materials inside being greater in depth than the width of the spine. For any bulky, fragile bound item, the solution is typically to use book cradles. This allows for the covers and spine to be fully supported. At Backstage, we also have adjustable copy stands that can be raised or lowered as necessary, further reducing handling and straining the spine as we finetune for the best capture.
When the scrapbook is laid flat, the left and right pages aren’t level. This is causing shadows and unfocused sections in the capture. In a similar way, the materials pasted onto a page have different heights and interfere with capturing a cohesive single image.
In either scenario, the solution becomes adjusting the book cradle and/or adding padding to make objects flush. Backstage’s camera stations utilize a piece of glass to gently flatten pages when digitizing; the goal becomes focusing on the capture area, one page at a time, with custom padding interleaved between covers and pages. We use rubber, paper, or foam. “One time,” Jeannise recalls, “we used napkins because the scrapbook pages were literal tissue paper. A single napkin laid underneath flattened the tissue so that we could get a clean image.”
Masking, too, often becomes a customized process. “Since scrapbooks tend to be thick, you have to make sure masking doesn’t drape over the sides and create glare.” We use either soft or hard masking, something like construction or cardstock paper respectively, to cover fanning of the book block, content that sticks above the edges from other pages, and to hide the cradle. It can also be used to make only one page shown at a time. The purpose of masking is to make sure the researchers’ eye is only drawn to relevant content in the image.
Some of the pages of the scrapbook have booklets pasted in, or items that layer overtop of one another and are meant to be folded out to read.
Every page of every object on a scrapbook page needs to be captured. This means that a single page of a scrapbook may have multiple captures. For example, let’s say a scrapbook page includes a booklet from a show. The booklet has a cover, two interior pages, and the back cover is permanently adhered to the scrapbook page. When digitized, that one scrapbook page will have 3 captures – one where each visible section of the booklet can be seen.
Consider a scrapbook with multiple tipped-in folded items and you can see how the number of images you’d need in order to capture everything quickly increases!
Should a scrapbook be digitized one-up (meaning one page per capture) or two-up (two pages in a single capture)?
The bigger the scrapbook, the further the camera head needs to be from the page to capture everything. The more-distanced the camera head, the smaller your resolution will be. And you can’t forget about tipped-in materials: will the capture size be able to accommodate the extra space needed when tipped-in materials are unfolded? Do they unfold over the gutter or over the edges of the scrapbook?
The answer to this question ultimately becomes what’s best for the library and its researchers. Two-ups sometimes better represent the intent of the creator more coherently. One-ups can allow for oversized tipped-in items to be captured clearly. Occasionally, the material can best be represented using a combination of methods.
To make a note on the camera and resolution specifications, Jeannise finds that, on average, a 100 MP camera at 300 PPI can suit many needs.
The materials inside the scrapbook are brittle.
No matter how careful the handling, brittle materials are sometimes too fragile to remain intact for digitization. Folded newsprint is a good example. Old pieces folded four times to fit on the page will sometimes break four times as it’s unfolded, and there’s little you can do to change that. At that point, handling the materials as carefully as possible and arranging resulting pieces with precision allows us to faithfully represent the original in its final archival image. This also means considering the static on the page and air that would disrupt fragments when we press gently down on the page with glass.
A Very Worthy Endeavor
In a webinar describing the process involved to digitize the Leffingwell Scrapbooks at the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State Libraries, Nena Couch observed that “scrapbooks provide fascinating and enlightening windows into 19th and early 20th century lives. They were a way that individuals organized information special to them and now they allow us to see what people thought was important.” Despite the complications, scrapbooks are unique and intensely valuable as they provide windows into the lives of the past, particularly from many kinds of economic and social backgrounds.
Jeannise says that if she could, she’d digitize scrapbooks all the time. “The content is so unique, and it’s a puzzle to figure it out. You have to intuitively determine, okay, how was this meant to look? How can I recreate that?”
Do you have a scrapbook that seems complicated to digitize? Have questions? Feel welcome to call us at 1.800.288.1265 or send an email anytime to info@bslw.com with your questions.
References:
Scullin, Katy. “Cut & Paste: Scrapbooking Then and Now.” Ohio Memory, May 3, 2024.
“The Fascinating History of Scrapbooking.” Scrapbook.com, January 16, 2017.
