History
Usefulness Of The Old Scrapbook?
By Craig W Walsh
Apr 4, 2008 - 10:08:46 AM

Some time ago Digby gave me an old scrapbook containing many black and white newspaper clippings --- all relating to the Guernsey breed.  Someone had taken the time to carefully cut these out and glue them into a scrapbook, and I suppose Digby wanted to preserve this information.

Because of the large size of the pages, it was impossible to scan this on "normal" scanning equipment.  I tried to take high-resolution digital photographs of the pages, but the results weren't very good.

And then I found ScanCafe in the States.  They specialise in scanning old negatives, photographs, etc. --- and their website specifically mentioned old scrapbooks.  I sent the Guernsey scrapbook to them, along with a whole shoebox of our old negatives, and I received back the scanned images.

These images are all quite large --- each page resulted in a 115,000KB TIF file (and 350,000KB in some cases).  To put that into context, most of the photographs on the ECGS website are about 350KB - 400KB.

I have converted four of the large TIF images to smaller JPG images, and have posted these four in the ECGS photo gallery.  One can be seen by clicking here --- and then double-clicking on the image itself to see it full size.

I don't know if all 110 images (of which these are the first four only) are of any use to anybody.  I see that there hasn't been a huge interest in Richard's posting on the forum to dispose of hard-bound herd books from 1952 - 1970.  So perhaps there just isn't much (or any) interest in this type of historic information.

I am happy to convert the remaining 106 scanned images to smaller JPG files and post them all in the photo gallery if anybody is interested in this information.  I have, after all, paid to have the scrapbook scanned.  (The original scrapbook has, incidentally, been returned to Digby for him to return it to its owner.)

If there is no interest in this information, I will keep the scanned images safely on my hard drive, and will be glad to furnish this information to anyone who might be interested.

Please either post a comment below, or please e-mail me --- just click here.