William P. Gottlieb Collection

Digitizing the Collection

Photographic negatives and color transparencies in the William P.
Gottlieb Collection are primarily nitrate and acetate film cut into
three sizes: 2-1/4 x 2-1/4, 3-1/4 x 4-1/4, and 4 x 5 inches. Contact
prints selected for the online presentation are 3-1/4 x 4-1/4 inches or
less and marked with cropping, burning, and other annotations, and
published prints from *The Golden Age of Jazz* (Simon and Schuster,
1979; Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995) are 8-1/2 x 11 inches or less except
for a few that are spread over two pages. Since the published prints are
duotone reproductions, moiré patterns often appear in the digitized
images; an image enhancement algorithm was applied to reduce this
effect. The existing 8x10-inch reference prints \-- representing only
\"Series A\" (about half of the negatives) \-- were not scanned because
higher quality digital reproductions can be created from the negatives
and transparencies. The reference prints may be viewed in the Music
Division Reading Room.

The William P. Gottlieb Collection is one of the first American Memory
photographic projects to be digitized with a camera at high levels of
spatial resolution. JJT Incorporated of Austin, Texas, scanned the
negatives, transparencies, annotated contact prints, and published
prints directly using an overhead-capture MARC II digital camera and
processed the images with custom software. From an uncompressed master
file, three service images were produced \-- a compressed reference
image, a very high-resolution compressed display image, and a thumbnail.
Each digital image is assigned a unique filename comprised of the item
identification number (last four digits of the local call number)
followed by a format indicator, image category indicator, and file
extension. The negatives, transparencies, and annotated contact prints
are captured in their entirety, including edges and extraneous
background features. Published prints represent artistic wishes by the
photographer and are thus cropped accordingly.

An Agfa Horizon Ultra flatbed scanner was used to capture *Down Beat*
articles from bound volumes and microfilm printouts. Bound *Down Beat*
volumes from the late 1940s presented a digitization problem because
articles printed in the gutter of the issue could not always be captured
by the scanner, and the paper itself is quite brittle \-- especially
those published in the latter part of 1947 when *Down Beat* experimented
with newspaper. Capturing the complete text of an article was the goal,
so it was sometimes necessary to scan a microfilm printout instead of
the original even though the resulting bitonal image may not be as
aesthetically pleasing. A compressed service image, with a spatial
resolution ranging from about 600 to 1000 pixels wide, was derived from
an uncompressed master file. Grayscale images are 8 bits-per-pixel while
colored *Down Beat* covers are 24 bits-per-pixel.

**Specifications for the Photographic Materials**

**Thumbnail Image**

Tonal depth: 8 bits-per-pixel

Format: Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)

Compression: native to GIF format

Spatial resolution: approximately 150 pixels on the long side of the
image

**Basic Compressed Service Image**

Tonal depth: grayscale: 8 bits-per-pixel

> color: 24 bits-per-pixel

Format: JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF)

Compression: JPEG at a quality setting that yields an average
compression of 15:1

Spatial resolution: approximately 640 pixels on the long side of the
image

**Larger Compressed Service Image**

Tonal depth: grayscale: 8 bits-per-pixel

> color: 24 bits-per-pixel

Format: JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF)

Compression: JPEG at a quality setting that yields an average
compression of 8:1

Spatial resolution: approximately 1000 pixels on the long side of the
image

**Uncompressed Archival Image (NOT AVAILABLE)**

Tonal depth: grayscale: 8 bits-per-pixel

> color: 24 bits-per-pixel

Format: Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)

Compression: None

Spatial resolution: approximately 5,000 pixels on the long side of the
image