The selections from the Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection were scanned from paper inscribed with typescript and handwritten ink and pencil. Woody Guthrie typed, wrote, and drew on brown paper bags, tissue paper, and envelopes, as well as on standard paper sizes and types. Correspondence from Library of Congress employees to Woody Guthrie exists primarily as typed carbon copies on onionskin. The scanned images of the onionskin have a blue tint as a result of eliminating glare.

Scanning was done on site at the Library of Congress by the Library of Congress Information Technology Services (ITS) scanning team using a PowerPhase FX overhead satellite digital camera with a 135-mm lens and Adobe PhotoShop software. The manuscripts were positioned in book cradles during scanning: a Linhoff glass-top cradle for 8 1/2 x 11 manuscripts and one built by John Reiser for oversized manuscripts. Derivatives were created using Image Alchemy scripts in UNIX.

One manuscript, handwritten across the width of an unfolded brown paper bag, had been scanned as two separate pages; the National Digital Library Program Web designer digitally concatenated the two images using Adobe Photoshop software.

Specifications for the scanned images

Manuscript items were scanned in color, 24 bits-per-pixel, at 300 dpi. The National Digital Library Program took delivery of uncompressed TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) images and created three service images.

Thumbnail Image:
Tonal depth: 8 bits-per-pixel
Format: Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)
Compression: native to GIF format
Spatial resolution: approximately 150 pixels on the long side of the image
Average file size: 15 KB

Basic Compressed Service Image:
Tonal depth: 24 bits-per-pixel
Format: JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF)
Compression: JPEG at a quality setting that yields an average compression of 15:1
Spatial resolution: approximately 640 pixels on the long side of the image
Average file size: 200 KB

Larger Compressed Service Image:
Tonal depth: 24 bits-per-pixel
Format: JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF)
Compression: JPEG at a quality setting that yields an average compression of 8:1
Spatial resolution: approximately 1000 pixels on the long side of the image
Average file size: 100 KB

Uncompressed Archival Image (NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE):
Tonal depth: 24 bits-per-pixel
Format: Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
Compression: None
Spatial resolution: approximately 5000 pixels on the long side of the image
Average file size: 30 MB

Typescript materials were converted to machine-readable form by the NDLP paper-scanning and text-conversion contractor, Systems Integration Group of Lanham, Maryland, at an accuracy rate of 99.95 percent and were encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), according to the American Memory Document Type Definition (DTD). This DTD is a markup scheme that conforms to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the work of a consortium of scholarly institutions. The texts of the transcripts have been translated to HTML for indexing and viewing on the World Wide Web.

Handwritten materials were transcribed and encoded as above by the National Digital Library Program.

The finding aid "Woody Guthrie Archival Materials in the Library of Congress," including but not limited to the Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection, has been newly created for presentation with this collection and brought into conformity with the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Document Type Definition (DTD), a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standard for encoding finding aids.