FORTEPAN IOWA PROJECT

FOR UNI STUDENTS

Your Role

1. Locate photographs, 1860-2000.

You will be finding amateur photographs from your family (or from your family’s friends, or from another family in Iowa), and digitizing them at the highest quality possible—in the range of 3000X4000.  We will be prizing photographic negatives and glass slides.  We are also looking for large print photographs.  Small photographs are possible to digitize too, although the quality is not always guaranteed.

2. Gain permissions for the photographs

There are two forms we are asking you to have your family sign.

A. PERMISSION TO SCAN form (yellow). This is the permission to digitize and upload the digitized photograph collection.

B. DEED OF GIFT form (pink). Through this form, the donor donates the digital versions of the images to FORTEPAN IOWA.  Your job is to explain this project to your family members, (or friends of your family, or other Iowans) and make sure they are comfortable with the public nature of this project. It is understandable that some of you will not be able to secure permissions.  We are asking a family to make their personal photographs viewable and downloadable to anyone in the world and to be part of a visual chronology that defines what it means to be “Iowan.” This is exciting and wonderful to many people, but it may be scary and uncomfortable for others.  You need to determine their comfort level, and then attain written permission if they agree to participate in this project. Family members will tell you what level of comfort they have!  It’s okay if they do not agree to participate in this project.  We will match you up with a classmate who has extra images to scan. If this is your situation, you have to be responsible for communicating early and well.  

3. Gather data on the photographs

You will be collecting data on the photographs—dates are most important.  If your family members agree to full participation, you will also document names of individuals in each photo and places where the photos were taken.  We are also interested in the stories behind the photographs.  The stories are often what make us choose to put a photograph in FORTEPAN IOWA or not. We will explain how to add your data to the FORTEPAN IOWA database and link this data to the photos you scan.  But for starters we are handing out a documentation table/template to help you gather information. Your template should be saved in your FORTEPAN IOWA folder as 00_Firstname_Lastname_Documentation_Table.doc and a hard copy also placed in the Manila folder in the file cabinet under the scanner in the Production House.  

4. Curate the photographs.

You will help us curate the overall collection.  We choose photographs based on their unique lens into the everyday world of Iowa citizens.  You will likely find a lot of family portraits.  Some of these will be interesting for the archive, but we have learned this: too many family portraits will be boring.  We are looking for photos that connect people to a place—e.g., a school, a downtown, a particular recreation area. We are looking for action photos. We are looking for photos that tell a story. We are looking for photos that are perhaps funny, or tragic, or involve a situation that Iowans might identify with, like a political rally. We are looking for images with “punctum.”  WHAT?  French literary theorist Roland Barthes came up with this term in a very famous little book called Camera Lucida (1980) that inquires about the nature and essence of photography.  Punctum refers to a part of a photograph that “pierces the viewer.”  It denotes a wounding, personally touching detail within a photograph that establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.  One finds punctum in special photographs, and we’re looking to put punctum in FORTEPAN IOWA.  This is what will keep the archive lyrical, and it will be this magic that will keep people engaged with the archive.

5. Digitize the 30 photographs and the permission forms.

We will DEDICATE A FOLDER TO YOU on the FORTEPAN IOWA server (you will be shown where this is located in the Production House!)  For this project you are responsible for digitizing (and saving to your dedicated folder) 30+ photographs.  These images should be chosen with punctum in mind!  ALL have to have dates as close as possible to when they were taken.

Here is our naming convention:

01_Bradley_Wilson_1954

To learn how to scan images at high resolution, you will need to set up a meeting with Bettina and/or a designated Media Consultant at the Production House or in the Digital Media Hub.  (THIS LIST WILL COME SOON).  We will help you learn how to properly digitize photos. We are extremely particular that photos need to be digitized within specific parameters.

Any lack of attention or laziness will mean more work for others, and (sorry to say) will impact your overall grade (something we are not fond of saying).

Images need to be digitized this way:

3000 px wide

JPEG

Color

No borders included in the scan.

Scanned upright.

You will also scan the two permission forms:

a_Permission to Scan (YELLOW).jpg

b_Deed of Gift (PINK).jpg

You will find a file cabinet underneath the Production House scanner (you can get the key from the Production House staff) containing a manila folder with your name on it.  Please put the ORIGINAL signed permission a and b forms in there, as well as a printout of your documentation table.