I confess, I’m a raider. When permitted, or rather, when I encounter no explicit prohibitions from library and archive staff, I like to get copies of both information directly useful to a current research project, but also of materials which might be useful on future projects or for friends working on something similar. I move in, pillage what I can, and retreat to pick through the plunder in search of new targets for the next day. I’m an information pack-rat and I refuse to go into rehab. I know there are many of us out there.
At some point a library or archive raider will have to admit the benefits of going digital. Increasingly, the weapon of choice is a camera. Anyone who has taken a lot of photographs of documents or books will probably recognize at least some of the basic challenges: 1) making sure the pictures are always in focus, 2) securing enough light, 3) keeping a book or document relatively flat to eliminate shadows, 4) minimizing hand, wrist, or back pain from holding a (good quality) camera for many hours, 5) and, whenever possible, not annoying anyone with the incessant camera clicking.
The ideal solution for some of these problems is to attach your camera to a copy stand. Some libraries, such as the Taiwan national library, and archives such as the US national archives at College Park, for example, already provide access to wonderful copy stands with excellent lighting, but such offerings are still rare. I know several graduate students who have built their own copy stands from scratch, including one who ordered custom cut plexiglas to use as as a flattening cover. These are the true “hackers” who build their solutions with wood, pipes, and tools that go buzz. Let us salute them.
The problem with most copy stands, including those you can order online, is that they are usually not very portable. The most portable alternative I have seen is the use of an articulated arm. I first saw this in action in the US national archives, where I watched in awe as an Israeli scholar sitting nearby clicked away using a camera remote and a camera attached to a metal arm fixed to his table. When I asked him where I might get such a marvelous thing, I was offered the name of a camera accessory store in Tel Aviv.
Fortunately, anyone can piece together a similar solution (no tools required) with a little handy searching on Amazon. The components you need are: a clamp (to attach to a table or bookshelf), an articulated arm (to attach to the clamp), a camera bracket (to attach to the arm), and a decent digital camera. Optional accessories include: a camera remote, an Eye-Fi memory card, and a sock.
My own personal solution uses:
- Manfrotto 035RL Super Clamp with 2908 Standard Stud (around $30)
- Manfrotto 196B-2 143BKT 2-Section Single Articulated Arm with Camera Bracket (around $40)
- A wired camera remote for my camera (I use a Lumix GF1 but many cameras have wired or wireless remotes)
I attach the foldable arm to the clamp, pop the folded contraption into my backpack, and bring it with me to libraries and archives. In the former, I usually camp out in as remote a location as possible, since taking photos can be distracting to others. To prevent any damage to tables or shelves, I put some pieces of scratch paper or a sock in the mouth of the clamp before attaching it. If no table edges are convenient or if I’m taking some quick book photos while standing in the book aisles of a library, I attach my clamp to a nearby shelf and extend or fold the arm as necessary. My wired camera remote has a long enough wire that I usually drop it down by my feet, and operate the button with my foot (a real hacker would create a custom foot lever and they can be bought for some cameras).
The result is a system that allows me to browse through documents or a book and whenever I come to a page or section worth preserving, I can, without picking up a camera, tap my foot on the remote while turning pages or holding documents flat. By using an Eye-Fi memory card, the pictures I take are beamed directly and immediately from the camera to my laptop if configured for a local wi-fi network. To reveal the extent of my surrender to dorkiness, if I take pictures directly in the darker book stacks of a library, I usually wear a headlamp to shine some extra light on the pages. If you try the same, be prepared for strange looks when anyone else stumbles into the same aisle as you while you are at work.
This is an acquisition system that has worked well for me. Are there other experienced raiders out there with tips to offer?
Lead image by Flickr user eiratansey / Creative Commons licensed. Other images by Konrad Lawson.
Edited to clean up HTML, and to include the third image.
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16 Responses to The Articulated Arm of an Archive Raider
kevinrguidry - December 7, 2010 at 11:57 am
Wow, I wish I had heard or thought of this a couple of years ago before I bought my copy stand! It’s kind of portable but awkward and a little heavy.
But there is one thing that I really like about my setup: I connect my camera directly to my laptop. This eliminates vibration from me handling the camera at all. It makes it easy for me to preview the photo (although I have forgotten to pay attention a few times and of course that is when the image was out of focus, something I didn’t discover until weeks later). And it allows me to use the storage space on my laptop’s hard drive.
I’m embarrassed to admit it but I have lights I can use with my stand and I haven’t used them for fear that bright lights could damage the archival materials. I guess I’m being way too cautious, eh? :)
etansey - December 7, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Too funny – I am a long time reader and fan of ProfHacker, and lo and behold today’s article features one of my CC images taken from work (I’m a processing staff member at an archive). Thanks for using it!
You might want to note that many archives have very different rules for what you can and cannot bring to your desk. Some allow a camera only, but no tripod. Some don’t allow photography at all, though this is changing. Many do not allow any external light sources to be used, only the room’s ambient light. It’s always a good idea to contact the staff directly prior to your visit to check on any photography guidelines.
(ProfHacker editors – I’d love to see more articles by guest librarian and archivist contributors!)
drnels - December 7, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I’m jealous of you people who get to take photos at your archives. I haven’t been able to do that any my archive sites yet.
kosboot - December 8, 2010 at 8:38 am
I’m a librarian who works at a major U.S. research library, and I know that one of the rules in many US research libraries precludes the use of flash photography and any kind of tripod, copy stand, or similar device when photographing. (Of course, this assumes that no permission is required on the material you’re photographing.)
The set-up described is great when you can do it, but most of the time you won’t be able to do it outside of your own house.
geochaucer - December 8, 2010 at 8:40 am
I wish I’d read this article last week. I just photographed an ancient family cookbook, handwritten, and setting up a camera stand would have spared my back and saved lots of cropping. (I’d thought of trying to make one but didn’t want to exercise the creativity.)
gryphons - December 10, 2010 at 6:00 pm
You’re right, Kevin – while your lights might not push the paper to embrittlement, imagine that light tens times a year for ten years – that’s a lot of light! And it’s scary if the guy is getting into archives with his Plex – Plexi is not bad, but using it to hold paper flat so he can get a good shot is like nailing a duck’s feet to a table so you can get a good shot – it’s not good for any of the parties involved. The paper is permanently deformed by the folding, “flattening” it this way just breaks the fibers and makes it weaker.
What’s really scary is that anyone thinks they are preserving a document by photographing it. Not! You’re saving a copy for yourself. Preserving it is saving it for everyone, not just getting yours and getting out.
There are also limitations on copying because of privacy and copyright concerns. And remember, the definition of archives is that they are unique – if you damage something, it’s damaged forever, no replacements are available, no where, no how.
I’m not a Luddite, I’m more likely to leave home without my cell than my camera. But I’m also an archivist, my job is to preserve information for future generations. So come on in, bring your camera, we have enough light and we’ll show you how to copy it correctly, so it’ll still be there for your kids someday.
ps – you might not be helping your friends – “picture my BFF sent me on his iphone” is not a citation for a paper….
kmlawson - December 12, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Thanks to everyone for their comments.
I appreciate those who point out that various archives and libraries have their own restrictions. There are many places where I have not been able to use anything. The provincial archives in Shandong, China did not allow me to use my camera but the intelligence archives in Taiwan did permit it. The Phillips rare book room at Harvard’s Widener library has a ‘no camera’ sign, but the rare book room in Harvard-Yenching have no problems with me using my articulated arm all day long, though an agreement I signed there restricts my publication of these in the form of a license, not at all untypical in archives. Several places have charged me for each photograph I have taken and others have required me to compose lists of everything I photographed.
Of all the places, the National Archives in the US was the most open. One archivist told me, “We rather you take hundreds of photographs than dozens of photocopies. Photocopying documents causes much more wear on the documents.”
The person I mentioned with a custom copy stand and using plexiglas was using the copy stand in their own room, and only on their own books or books checked out from the library, but I can see how that can damage archival documents. As with most copy stands, it would not be convenient to bring to the archive, at any rate.
As for external light source – I only use the headlamp in dark aisles of libraries, and try to take my photos at a desk where there is good natural or artificial light. As several comments pointed out, strong lights such as those in copy stands can damage documents.
-Can anyone explain why tripods (and presumably articulated arms) are sometimes not permitted when cameras are? Not permitting them will ultimately lead to poor practices such as clumsy one-handed holding down of documents/books or the use of weights on top of documents.
-Good point by gryhpons about preservation: I recognize that there would be a resource and time commitment but I wish archives promoted the sharing of a copy of all photos taken by visiting scholars. Even if they are sub-par quality and incomplete, if they were deposited into a file database by source and someone came along who wished to look at the source they could, for example, be informed that there are 2 previous visitors who photoed part of a source or collection of sources and they might want to take some of those photos instead of wasting a lot of time (and wear on the documents) redoing the photos themselves. It is not, of course, as good as good quality digitization undertaken by the archive itself but could ultimately provide a small but meaningful benefit to both the preservation of documents (by reducing wear) and helping the visitor get the copies they want.
For example: I was horrified when I was told by a military archivist at NARA that half a dozen separate Korean teams all came through to digitize the same collection captured North Korean documents. Surely this wear could have been minimized if the first few teams had submitted a copy of their files to the archive before they left. Am I too naive for believing this could somehow be workable?
sshields - December 14, 2010 at 3:49 am
Do you have recommendations for the best way to label, sort, and read those jpg images? I have tried to convert them to pdf files, but I haven’t found a simple process to make my thousands of archive photographs easily usable. Thanks for any suggestions.
kevinrguidry - December 15, 2010 at 4:11 pm
sshields – If I had a lot of images that I wanted to keep organized, I’d look into something like Picaso or Flickr. I like the convenience of having materials online and those sites are used by many people to organize large numbers of photos so they should work for this, too.
Personally, I do what you said you have tried to do: convert them to pdf. But that only works for me because the vast majority of my documents are text so I can import them to Adobe, OCR them, clean them up, and upload them to my bibliographic tool. I don’t have many non-text images, partially because the archives I’ve visited are much more sensitive about letting visitors take and use photographs of photos and drawings.
sshields - December 16, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Thanks, Kevin. Mine are almost all text. Can you provide more information about how you do this?
kevinrguidry - January 18, 2011 at 4:14 pm
sshields – Apologies for not replying sooner!
My process is slow and cumbersome but that’s not all bad. My camera software captures photos as jpgs so the first thing I do is import them into Adobe Acrobat, one document (but not necessarily one image) at a time to keep from confusing and getting ahead of myself. I then adjust the images as necessary – crop the edges, rotate, adjust balance, etc. The OCR process also takes care of some of those details and that is the next step. Finally, I upload the document to my online bibliographic tool, creating a corresponding bib record in the process.
I told you it’s cumbersome! But I’m largely ok with that as it gives me time to really read and mentally process the documents, something I don’t really do while I’m in the archives because my time there is so valuable and always too brief. I also allow myself to abandon this process at any point if I don’t think the document will be useful or informative so this process is also the time when I’m culling the documents. I cast a wide net while I’m actually in the archives and take the time later to sort and process things.
The one thing that I sometimes overlook – much to my regret later! – is not carefully noting in my photos the bibliographic information about the document, including its location in the archive. Using a camera and a stand allows me to physically leaf through and take photos of a tremendous amount of documents and it’s very easy to forget to keep the kinds of records necessary to track/label all of the photos. I like this system but I do miss having archivists and student workers make copies because they’re so good about always writing down information on the actual copies.