One of the next steps in my internship was scanning Peter Cohen vernacular photos into the computer. The photos were donated to the Berger Archive by Peter Cohen who is a famous photographer. This week, I learned how to use the scanner we have in the archive and why it’s important to digitize materials and have them scanned into a computer. It was a lot of fun to sort through the photos and put them into a digital folder. I would go through and scan hundreds of photos a day to be sent to a friend of the archive to be used for their art! It was a lot of repetitive movements of taking the photo from the box of photos to the scanner to be scanned, but it is important work! I had to make some decisions about what photos would fit in our collection and which ones would not. For example, if a photo was too recent (taken within the last 15 years or so) then we did not choose to scan it in to be part of our collection. Something interesting I learned was how to make the decision of what to keep in the photography collection and what not to. By the end of scanning photos in, I had scanned around 300+ photos altogether. It was a lot of fun to see what people decided to take photos of and what was important enough to take a photo of.
In the photo above, you can see the scanner to my right and a stack of photos next to it. The photo lying next to the scanner is a photo we decided not to scan in because you cannot see the faces of the people in the photo!