My involvement with the Petra Project began when I asked the Old Woman, a.k.a. my advisor - Professor Kay Vandergrift, if she had any projects that might be suitable for me to work on as part of an independent study. I was looking for the opportunity to study of children's literature more-in depth. I also spoke about my background in museum education and my desire to combine both my interest in art with my interest in children's literature. After brainstorming for a while, Professor Vandergrift told me about a course she had designed and taught after having received a Mellon Foundation grant to study original art for 20th century children's book illustration. The course, "The Art of the Picture Book," was taught at The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum as part of the Youth Literature Online Certificate Program offered by Rutgers University's School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies' Professional Development Studies. Due to various restrictions - from the prohibition of the frequent handling of sensitive artwork to obtaining the minimum enrollment needed to run the course - the idea of redesigning the course as an online course had taken root. This would entail accessing The Zimmerli's collection in a radically new way. The Petra Mathers Collection of material related to Kisses From Rosa was highlighted as part of the original course. The collection includes both original artwork and manuscripts. Professor Vandergrift thought that this collection might be an ideal centerpiece for an online version of the course because it is extensive and, best of all, the author held her own copyright.

If I was interested, Professor Vandergrift agreed to pursue the project by contacting Gail Aaron, Assistant Curator of Children's Book Illustrations in the Department of Prints and Drawings at The Zimmerli Museum, Karen Novick at SCILS Office of Professional Development Studies, and Petra Mathers, the author and copyright owner. If everyone agreed she would attempt to obtain funding for the equipment necessary for a digitizing project of this scale.

I was interested; I was definitely interested. My letter of intent to pursue an independent study during summer semester was approved and on file by February. For the next three months Professor Vandergrift was the one working to get everything in place for my start in June. She consulted with many of the experts she had worked with while collecting tail feathers to identify the best equipment. She negotiated many deals including where the equipment would be housed and who would have access to it.

So, as I began my independent study in June I had what I thought was a modest goal, digitalitizing and scanning the original artwork and manuscript for Petra Mathers' book Kisses From Rosa. Sure I knew it would get trickier because after I finished photographing and scanning I was going to work on designing a website to showcase the ten year evolution of the book from the first draft to its published state. The trick, I thought, was that I had minimal experience with writing html.

Little did I know at the time but was I ever wrong.

Even before the official start of my independent study two things became immediately apparent, one my role as photographer was minor; my real role was of a project manager. Second, it became clear that a database would be needed to work in conjunction with the images and the webpage. No problem, I thought, this may take a little longer but it can be done. More than one year later, as I sit to write this essay, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I jump to the end of the story let me return to the beginning. I had a goal. I had a schedule (every Monday for the months of June, July & August). I had equipment (a camera, a scanner, a computer, and a printer,). But how to put it all together?

What does a librarian in training do when faced with this type of situation? The answer, of course, is research. I began to research. What should I read so that I can make informed decisions? Who has done digitizing projects for the Internet? I can't say I thought about these questions blindly. I had some clues, as I had just finished a course on Manuscripts & Archives. Although not focused on digital archives, the course did cover resources for digital archives. It was during this time that I discovered the website for the Five College Archives Digital Access Project [http://clio.fivecolleges.edu]. Initially, I was drawn to the site because my alma mater, Smith College, was one of the participating institutions. The website for The Smith College Archives [http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/smith/] soon became the starting point of my research into digital archival standards. See the list of websites that I found to be particularly helpful. In addition to the plethora of online material I also found Moving Theory Into Practice (2000) by Kenney and Rieger to be informative.

I quickly discovered that digitization standards do not uniformly exist. It has been up to each institution or each project director to select the proper standards for the project. How would my project fit in?

The first question, to consider was what format should the images be saved in? Although it was a given that the requirements for archival formats and web-based formats were different it was not immediately apparent what those respective formats were. I compared the standards used by other digitization projects and considered how to balance the pros (best quality) and the cons (storage requirements) before insisting to anyone who asked that the archival format must be uncompressed TIFF files. Then in consultation with The Knight in Shining Armor, Alex Daley, we agreed on a format for the web-based images. Please refer to the Technical Paper: The Petra Project for the final format specifications that were used for this project.

My next challenge was to learn how to use all of the equipment at my disposal. Although I had a solid background in photography I had not done any digital photography prior to the start of the project, so I spent a lot of time practicing with the camera and reading the manual. Our funding allowed for the purchase of a top-of-the-line camera, The Olympus Camedia Digital Camera E-10. I was fortunate to have the assistance of Wendy White, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Zimmerli Museum. Without her patience and guidance I would probably still be struggling to make sense of all the equipment.

The most challenging problem that occurred had to do with the lighting. Unfortunately, the workroom at The Zimmerli that was available for the duration of the project did not have ideal lighting conditions. The amount of light varied from day to day and hour to hour based on the weather and the time of day. The design of the room provided no way of controlling how much light reached the room. In addition some of the electric lights had to remain on whenever the Museum was open because the light switch controlled some of the gallery lights. Given this situation it was imperative that copy stand lights be used to overcome this variable and achieve a uniform light source. Again, this solution came with some additional difficulties. There were limits to how far away the copy stand lights could be moved and depending on the size of the original artwork this created the potential for bright spots on the final images. Additionally, it was discovered that the lights were drastically altering the color of the digital images and once they were examined they had an overall reddish cast to them. Capturing the white of the paper seemed to be impossible. Again, it was Wendy's expertise along with advice from The Zimmerli's photographer that allowed us to find a workable solution. By switching to daylight balanced bulbs, much of the color distortion was finally eliminated. In terms of photographing the drawings, which are done for the most part on off-white paper, again a compromise had to be reached. Did we want to approximate the white of the paper or did we want the accurately capture the pencil lines. The answer is somewhat self evident, the goal was to see the drawing. Viewers do need to keep in mind that accurate color was sacrificed in order to get better quality images. So that anyone working with the original TIFF files would be able to determine the magnitude of this compromise all of the artwork was photographed with color balance strips along one edge. These color balance strips have been cropped out of all the web format images. Ultimately, since the viewing of color varies so much from one computer monitor to another it was decided that the clarity and quality of the image would be the first priority and accuracy of color would come second.

While the lighting issue was being solved I focused my attention on the manuscripts, which were to be scanned. The scanner, a Hewlett-Packard Scanjet 7400c, did not present any technical problems. Because all of the manuscripts were edited by hand, scanning could not be done accurately using OCR. The issue surrounding the manuscript was, therefore, one of format. Again, I was creating TIFF archival files. For the web format I ultimately tried both GIF and JPEG and under Alex's recommendation the JPEG standard was chosen. Once the manuscripts were done it was back to the artwork.

I wish I could say that once the lighting hurdle was cleared it was smooth sailing. But alas, there was one other problem - transferring the TIFF images from the camera to a storage medium. Due to the immense size of TIFF files and the limitations on the cameras storage capacity only two images could be photographed at a time. The time needed to transfer the images to the computer before storing them on CD-ROMs was slowed down by another technical problem. We couldn't get the USB transfer cable to work properly and had to instead transfer the files using a Flash Path/Smart Media Card, a slower more cumbersome method. Finally, three months into the project a technician from The Zimmerli solved the USB cable problem! I began photographing in earnest as the semester was coming to an end and ostensibly so was my independent study.

Yes, I did extend my independent study into a second semester and the first thing on my addenda was to complete photographing the artwork. Once that was done I began to scan the photomechanicals. The photomechanicals were the last of The Zimmerli holdings that needed to be digitized. However, there was one question to resolve before my work at The Zimmerli would be complete. How was the completed book going to be shown on the website. Since the book was published did Mathers have the copyright or did the publisher? While Vandergrift was working to clarify that question, it was unanimously agreed that I would scan the actual book. Since I could no longer work at The Zimmerli on a regular basis due to of my schedule I need to finish up my work there. The book scans proceeded without any problems. Although, in retrospect, I probably should have scanned them at a lower resolution. Since these images were in color, unlike the manuscripts and photomechanicals, the file size was tremendous.

In any case, with the completion of the book scans my work at The Zimmerli came to an end. My independent study moved to a new phase, the creation of the derivatives needed for the website. All of the specifications had been decided ages ago so it was clear sailing. Other, than the manuscripts for which I created a single image (smaller images were illegible and therefore useless) I created three different sized derivatives for each image. See the Technical Paper: The Petra Project for all of the format specifications.