About the Online Image Collection

Selection Criteria
These photographs were selected based on uniqueness, the importance of their subjects, and relevance to the Lower Cape Fear region. Generally copy photographs were not digitized except in instances where the original remains in the hands of a private individual and is not available to the public. This is a growing collection — we will continue to add photographs, both from our existing collections and as we receive donations from the public.

Technical Details
Each image was scanned at 600dpi in 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale and saved as a losslessly-compressed TIFF. The PNG versions of these images in use on the site were created with Multiple Image Resizer .NET and compressed with pngcrush. Other than cropping and rotating, no editing was done to the scanned images except in a small number of cases where the quality of the image was particularly poor.

The descriptive information for each record was taken from existing catalog cards and converted to Dublin Core metadata. The Dublin Core was used to generate the individual page for each record and as an index for searching purposes by a Perl program developed in-house. Each record page contains the Dublin Core metadata embedded in the HTML as per RFC 2731 to enable automatic harvesting and simpler integration with future Dublin Core-based systems.

All attempts were made to adhere to the NC ECHO Digitization Guidelines throughout this project. In addition, we have tried to follow the NC ECHO Dublin Core Best Practices Guidelines wherever practical.