Digital Object Rotation

[WaxCylinderRevival]

At the Innovation meeting, we touched on the utility of digital object rotation for both transcription purposes and to possibly correct digital files that were loaded in a non-preferred orientation.

Rotation in viewer

• For normal viewing and transcription purposes, this is an enhanced business need.
• The image/document would always begin in the default orientation view. On load, the user could rotate the digital object an unlimited number of times.
  • Minimal: 90 degree rotation, 4 options
  • Enhanced: do we need to add more degrees of rotation (30, 45, open)?

Ability to lock orientation primary view

• Should the system offer the ability to lock an orientation as the primary view?
  • @mereastew mentioned Gary Stern's pool of partner-digitized objects that were wrongly-oriented.
  • Should this function be restricted to staff or offered to public users?
  • If open to public users, would they have to be logged in to rotate and lock the primary view? (Likely yes, to be able to track any shenanigans, should they arise.)

[mereastew]

+1 to the rotation in the viewer.

For locking orientation: How often does Gary or anyone else need to rotate images before uploading them? If crowdsourcing could help with this & reduce processing time, that would be great. If opening a "lock" orientation just opens us up to more spam locking without tangible benefit, then I would say it wouldn't be worth it. If it just "locks" the orientation in the viewer, but not in the file itself, then that would be another layer that would have to be transferred when it needs to go to a new system.

Maybe start with rotation in the viewer and explore locking for future. I'd love to try to get rotation in sooner, when we do "full screen."

[WaxCylinderRevival]

I definitely agree on moving on the rotation functionality, especially to aid in transcription efforts, and then exploring the lock function later.

[ghstern]

Actually, by the time that "I" get them, they are "viewer-ready." I'm not sure how much Mike or Suzanne rotate images....

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Wax Cylinder Revival < notifications@github.com> wrote:

I definitely agree on moving on the rotation functionality, especially to aid in transcription efforts, and then exploring the lock function later.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/usnationalarchives/OPAProd/issues/100#issuecomment-86225168 .

Gary H. Stern Digital Public Access (VEO) Office of Innovation National Archives and Records Administration

phone: 301-837-3025 email: garyh.stern@nara.gov

The National Archives Catalog https://catalog.archives.gov/

[WaxCylinderRevival]

I just called Gary and he said that, in his experience, improperly oriented images have been few and far between and more of an internal production issue than a partner issue. He said he would consider a lock feature to be a lower priority enhancement feature.

In our discussion, Gary did say that he has rejected image sets that were inconsistently done and we started talking about how the wrong orientation issue might grow as we start to interact with user-contributed images via the Hub, etc. As the agency-to-catalog pipeline quickens, we might find large volumes of digital images that need orientation corrections.

We thought we should move exploration of the lock issue to the point at which we begin accepting user contributions of images. Gary also noted we might have legacy digitization problems.

Note: As I was writing, Gary chimed in above.^