The Glass Slide Saga
After finishing up with meeting house photographs, postcards, etc., I moved on to glass slides featuring images of Quaker meeting houses. So the problem was, how exactly does one scan glass slides? Well, luckily some of the scanners here in Special Collections are equipped to scan glass slides. So I put the slide on the scanner, set it to the right setting pressed scan, and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the scanner did not recognize that there was anything there to be scanned. Oops. So I asked more knowledgeable people than I am, and found that I needed a plastic slide holder to make it work. The next problem was that there were no slide holders that fit the glass slides with which I was working. That’s when improvising seemed to be the only option. I used a guide that fit the scanner I was using, flipped the glass slides vertically (even though the guide was oriented horizontally) and tried scanning again. The results were not so great (see below).
So, it’s pretty and colorful, but it certainly is not an image of a meeting house. I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong here, but eventually I was able to get scans like the ones below…
Abington Friends Meeting House, Jenkintown, PA, 1836
Atlantic City Meeting House, Atlantic City, NJ, 1872
Everything went well with the scanning of these 3 in. by 4 in. slides (the smallest of the glass slides in the collection). New problems arose when it came time to scan the 5 in. by 7 in. slides. The scanner I used could only scan slides that fit between a 3.25 in. by 10.5 in. area (a very long and narrow rectangle). The new slides’ dimensions exceeded this constraint.
So the project hit a brick wall for a time until a scanner with the correct settings and equipment to scan the larger glass slides could be found. The new scanner was much easier to use because no guide was needed to scan the glass slides. I used this particular scanner for the larger 6.5 in. by 8.5 in. slides as well.
Merion Friends Meeting House, Merion, PA, 1695, remodeled 1829
Haverford Friends Meeting House, Haverford, PA, 1834, enlarged in 1894
Now all of the glass slides have been scanned and will hopefully be available on Triptych in the near future!
Tags: Meeting Houses