All of the newspapers digitized for the Texas Digital Newspaper Program will be created according to the national standards set by Library of Congress for the National Digital Newspaper Program. View Library of Congress’s Technical Guidelines. We feel it is vital to meet the national standards for digitizing newspapers for preservation purposes and to meet a high level of functionality. The intention is to create a good quality product that will stand the test of time. Here’s a very basic list of the file types created in the digitization process for this standard:

  • Create digital images from a preservation copy of microfilm, a clean second-generation duplicate silver negative.
  • Scan at 8-bit grayscale with a resolution of 400 dpi, if possible; otherwise between 300 and 400 dpi (relative to the size of the original newspaper.)
  • Create image output file as an uncompressed TIFF 6.0, from which PDF and text derivatives with the same file name will be made.
  • Capture a standards-based target film strip at the start of each session, to monitor equipment performance.
  • Split dual images into individual newspaper images as necessary.
  • Deskew images with more than 3% skew.
  • Crop page image files to the edge of the newspaper, retaining the original edge and up to a quarter inch beyond.
  • Produce grayscale images that have exactly the same dimensions, spatial resolution, skew, and cropping as the images used for OCR.
  • Provide all digital files to partner on a 1TB external hard drive.