I have digitised 188 obituaries of deceased members for Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund. The obituaries were printed in the society's annual reports and yearbooks and cover years of death from 1933 to 2020 — 1,394 pages in all. 186 of the obituaries include a portrait photograph of the member.
The oldest obituaries, with years of death 1933–1959, are found in bound annual reports. They were scanned gently, spread by spread, at 600 dpi in colour on our Image Access Bookeye 5 V1 Archive, and the spreads were then split into single pages at the gutter. Most of the yearbooks from 1960–1988 and 2018–2020 could instead be cut open at the spine and fed as loose sheets through our Inotec Scamax 6x1. The remaining yearbooks — mainly those with obituaries from 1991–2018 — were scanned on the overhead scanner.
After scanning, the pages have been post-processed at pixel level: they have been straightened along the text lines, curved lines have been straightened out and the edges have been filled in with the paper's own texture. Dust and specks in the margins have been removed without touching the text, uneven lighting from the overhead scanning has been evened out and the running head has been given a consistent position. The portraits have been centred. Within each obituary, all pages are the same size.
Each obituary is delivered as three files, named after the member: a searchable PDF file at 300 dpi, a searchable PDF file at 150 dpi for web use and, as the archival master, a multi-page TIFF at 600 dpi in colour with an embedded sRGB colour profile. In this way each obituary is kept together, and the text in the PDF files is searchable.
Read more about our service for book scanning — we digitise yearbooks, memorial publications and other bound series, with gentle overhead scanning when the books cannot be cut open, into archival TIFF or searchable PDF files.