In the beginning...

I think this first post will probably be the hardest. I can't ever quite figure out where to start a project but once it's going, I can get into the rhythm and it gets easier.
I had a couple people tell me they thought I should start a blog about some of the strange and beautiful things that come thru my office. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea and.. well... here I am writing my 1st post.
I thought I would start with the introduction- My unit at the University of Michigan Library is called Digital Conversion. We scan materials for the library.
Here's a bit about our natural progression- In the very beginning when I hired in, we were a microfilming unit for the Preservation Division. Preservation trained some of the early workers on the Making of America project and others about how to prepare materials for capture (microfilm for us, digital for them). Then we started getting into some scanning activities and getting images from a couple of our vendors.
When the Library decided to go to all digital reformatting, we were scanning random books that were brittle or otherwise in bad shape, the same as we were for microfilming. Then, a few years ago, we moved to soliciting groups of materials that could be done as small projects.
Our next step, about 3 years ago, was to start working on the materials that have been rejected by the Michigan Digitization Project (Formerly Google Scholar, now Google Books Project). These are all typically in poor condition and falling apart and that means that Google is unable to scan them. However, since we have always worked with old, brittle and difficult materials we already had the expertise to deal with them.
Additionally, we are now getting a lot more materials from the Special Collections and Rare Book rooms on campus.
The bottom line is, we see a lot of different, unique, interesting stuff in my office, and I would like to share it.