Scanning

Last Thursday I started the scanning process for the first binder of slides. This involves using the Wildflower Center's slide scanner, which can hold about 50 slides at once, but scans at a rate of 1-2 minutes per slide. To prepare for scanning, I marked each slide with a yellow dot in the top right corner, so that I could easily put each slide back in its place without having to hold the slide up to the light to determine its orientation. I also wrote the slide label number on each slide pocket so that, when returning the slides to the binder, there would be no confusion about which slide belonged in which pocket.

The scanning process was extremely slow, partly because of the speed of the scanner and partly because the scanner jammed frequently. On the first day of scanning, I was only able to complete 150 slides. While the slides were being scanned, I worked on transposing the metadata from the slide sheets and the slides themselves (many were labeled with location, date, or other information) into the spreadsheet that I created last Tuesday. In addition to the required fields that I had created the spreadsheet with, I added fields for location (e.g., garden or property name) and location notes (i.e., any further information related to location that was written on the slide sheet or on the slide itself), as well as date.

So far, I have finished scanning the first binder and organizing the first two binders and part of the third. At this point, there are a little more than 400 distinct slides that need to be added to the database.