Advanced Imaging and Archiving Skills for Indigenous Communities

FAIN: PE-284368-22

Cultural Heritage Imaging (San Francisco, CA 94102-5867)
Carla Schroer (Project Director: May 2021 to present)

The creation of two five-day training sessions at three sites, with follow-up sessions and consulting both online and in person to capture cultural heritage materials with two-dimensional and three-dimensional imaging. The participating Indigenous groups from Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine would learn how to prepare their photographic data, their 3D work products, the contextual metadata that describes how these digital assets were acquired and built, and how to make a standards compliant submission to an archival preservation system.

This project provides a program of in-depth, hands-on training in advanced computational photography 2D and 3D documentary and archival technologies. It is a collaboration between Cultural Heritage Imaging and three indigenous community organizations: The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, serving the Unangax^ (Aleut) people; Huliauapa’a, serving Hawai’i’s native people; and the Passamaquoddy Tribal Government in Maine. The training sessions will build a sustainable core of culture bearers in each community to digitally document their material culture and heritage sites. A scientific imaging work flow and tools that simplify metadata management give the generated digital representations reliability and reusability. Tools supporting archival submission of the digital documentary materials help ensure the long-term preservation of each community’s digital collections. The project will help each community perpetuate their heritage and take control of their cultural narrative.

Associated Products

Understanding Photographic Data Capture (Web Resource)
Title: Understanding Photographic Data Capture
Author: Carla Schroer
Author: Mark Mudge
Author: Marlin Lum
Abstract: This series is for people who are using their camera as a sensor to collect data for computationally assisted applications such as photogrammetry, Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and the ever-expanding range of documentary photography tools. We cover the ways to collect the highest quality information about an imaging subject, retain the integrity of this information as it is processed, and store the information in a way that is sustainable and enables informed reuse by others. The four video series comprises ~40 minutes of instructional material.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/channels/photographicdatacapture
Primary URL Description: A channel on the Vimeo service with 4 instructional videos in this series
Secondary URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTr9I8PeyMMd06Bip6LY6UOowGTDxF-B-
Secondary URL Description: A playlist on YouTube for the same series of 4 videos

Simplifying Scientific Imaging, Video series (Web Resource)
Title: Simplifying Scientific Imaging, Video series
Author: Carla Schroer
Author: Mark Mudge
Author: Marlin Lum
Abstract: Learn about the Digital Lab Notebook (DLN) from Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) Download the free software from CulturalHeritageImaging.org/downloads This instructional video series is about the DLN, what it does, how to use the software tools, and more. Add advanced metadata to your imaging projects in photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). Validate you image sets, and learn archival workflows. This seven video series comprises ~80 minutes of instructional materials on how to use the features of the Digital Lab Notebook Software
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/channels/digitallabnotebook
Primary URL Description: This is a channel on the Vimeo video service which includes all 7 videos in the series, along with descriptions of each video.
Secondary URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTr9I8PeyMMcDidKanBG82e5VyiUjN-2g
Secondary URL Description: This YouTube playlist includes all seven videos in the series.

---