Digital standards
During the evolution of the "Latvians Baptists in America" project, the need for digital imaging standards has become clear. As a public history endeavor, the project seeks to provide visitors to the website with high-quality images that also load quickly. At the same time, not everyone who might submit material to the digital archive has at their disposal a high-resolution scanner. A balance has to be struck, and even then allowances have to be made for when minimal standards cannot be met. For digital images, the following standards have been defined for the project.
Master image (archived, not available to public)
Bit depth: 8-bit grayscale or 24-bit color
Format: TIFF
Compression: none or lossless
Resolution: 600 dpi
Dimension: 100 percent of original
Access image (for website display)
Bit depth: 8-bit grayscale or 24-bit color
Format: JPEG
Compression: Lossy (7:1-10:1 for grayscale; 10:1-20:1 for color)
Resolution: 72 ppi
Dimension: Downsize to 1920 pixels across the long dimension
These standards have been adapted from the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative's Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials (2016), the Digital Imaging Working Group's Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices (2008), and the Minnesota Historical Society's Digital Imaging for the Small Organization (2016).