Don’t Digitise the Dirt?

Sorry to all those of you who were hoping to see the McMillan Sisters’ Lantern Slides which I promised last week. We’ve discovered that they need cleaning or we’ll ‘digitise the dirt’.

If we’re right in our assumption that these were the slides used by Margaret McMillan on her lecture tours, then  it could be argued that the ‘dirt’ is archival if we could identify the finger prints as Margaret’s. Yes, archive science is often forensic.

So the question is, do we ‘digitise the dirt’, then clean and digitise again. Twice the work, and twice the digital storage space.

Here’s a picture of Margaret to be going on with. If you search on Google Images, you will see that there might be a problem with this image. Its something we often face when digitising old glass slides.