Indexing and legibility.

LegacyUser

Burke Wayland Mattsson said: Over the past decade, I have scanned hundreds of letters, documents and photos and they come back looking like what I scanned. I am indexing, and constantly run across documents that are dark, blurry, or both. How can black and white documents turn out so bad when scanned or copied? When the person doing the scanning sees that the product is dark or blurry, why don't they redo it so it is legible?

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: Many of the scans on the FS website are scans of microfilm. These microfilms were often made decades ago, and many have degraded or have been damaged. If you see a whole series of poor images, you could contact FS about it, and they might be able to either rescan the microfilm or ask the archives if they can scan the original records again (in a digital format). If it's just the occasional image, then there's probably nothing that can be done, unless FS gets permission to digitally scan the originals at the archive. FS has to prioritize their resources, and in most cases they'd rather be scanning records that have never been on microfilm or scanned in any way rather than fixing up minor issues with records they already have.

LegacyUser

Paul said: I have to disagree on your last point. I have been commenting here for a long time that FamilySearch should keep a close eye on what it films to ensure the current duplication is reduced and priority given to filming new material.

I know sometimes the duplication problem relates just to indexing, but when I used to order microfilms from my local FHC I was surprised at the number of catalogued records that had "another filming" recorded alongside.

However, this could prove to Burke's advantage if there is another film of the same material that was filmed completely independently of the one he has viewed.

Some of these situations are far from "minor issues", with tremendous inconsistency in contrast and sharpness from image to image. I know from viewing original parish registers that it is purely the original filming that is often the problem and that a lot of FamilySearch's material (ideally) does need to be refilmed.

From my experience, I have to agree with Burke: there has been a lot of carelessness in filming perfectly legible documents.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: It is an interesting point - to what extent does the person doing the digitisation of the microfilm / fiche / document actually see the resultant image?

Or do they set the exposure, focus, etc up at the start, then just press a button and walk away to the next camera?

I really don't know - except that I have a distinct feeling that physical books can be scanned automatically.

LegacyUser

Burke Wayland Mattsson said: I captured a dark and barely readable index entry to Photoshop, and quickly enhanced it by making it lighter and sharper. It became perfectly legible. I would think it would be a good idea for Family Search to add a function to their indexing site wherein the person doing the indexing could have the ability to lighten and sharpen an image.