Notes From Nature Talk

High-resolution scans, please

  • ghewson by ghewson

    The blog post on May 4 mentioned the Virginia collection was scanned at 39 megapixels. Could these high-resolution scans be made available online, for helping to interpret poor handwriting? I think it would be really useful.

    For instance, I downloaded the image shown when I comment on ANN0000mgs, and this is 1540x1896 pixels. This is not sufficient to see the specimen number clearly enough to see the middle digit or digits. Is that 564, 5134, or something else? A high-resolution scan would help, I think.

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  • asallans by asallans scientist

    Yes, we did (and do) scan at very high resolution, but we're limited in what we can post in Notes from Nature because of the significant file size with each of those high resolution images. In preparing collections for Notes from Nature, we put all images through a downsizing and conversion process to make sure they will show up quickly and easily for all users. One of the tradeoffs, unfortunately, is lower quality resolution or sizing.

    Perhaps one of the Zooniverse developers will jump in here with an idea of how to get around this most easily to help with these types of problems. Thanks for bringing this up and asking!

    Posted

  • ghewson by ghewson in response to asallans's comment.

    I wasn't suggesting the high-res scans be used as a matter of course, but made available for download where they'd help.

    Posted