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Case Studies & Testimonials

Client: Alpha Chi Omega Sorority
Topic: Archiving

Situation
Our client was:

  • The national headquarters for chapters located at universities throughout the United States.
  • The organization had over 40,000 pages of history contained in their quarterly journal named “The Lyre” dating from 1894 on to today. There is only one copy of volumes from 1921 and earlier and if they got destroyed or misplaced, that history could be lost forever.
  • Publications were hard bound and very fragile yet still were handled daily by the archivist due to requests for information.
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Challenges
The challenges facing us were in:

  • Cataloging and packing books so no further damage would result in transport to scanning center
  • Scanning so that the backbone would not be stressed, yet the pages would be flat
  • Capturing the quality and halftones of the photos but also having crisp readable type. The pages had yellowed.

Actions
The actions we took to address these challenges were:

  • Recording each volume description, page count, size, etc. into a ledger sheet.
  • Bubble wrapping volumes (many individually) into sturdy cartons
  • Hand delivering to scanning center
  • Scanning a sample for approval prior to production
  • Scanning the volumes, creating hybrid pages for type and photos. Creating searchable PDF files.
  • Delivering files on a CD with index that allows users to search among all volumes.

Results
Our actions resulted in:

  • Creating a full set of searchable digital facsimiles of their precious history. Many hours of manually searching through 40,000 pages for requested information is eliminated and now this information is available within seconds.
  • One-of-a-kind books can be safely stored in a vault so that no further deterioration takes place.
  • Copies of history are in multiple “off-site” locations so that it will never be lost.