Digital Preservation of a Highway Photolog Film Archive in Connecticut.

摘要

The Connecticut Department of Transportation has been photologging their transportation network for over forty years. Photologging at a minimum refers to the use of an instrumented vehicle, which is designed to capture successive photographs of the roadway at defined intervals. Connecticut is not unique when it comes to photologging and historical imagery. According to the 1982 National Cooperative Highway Research Program Synthesis of Highway Practice Number 94 on Photologging, at least 41 states, 29 cities, 6 counties, the U.S. Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service have used photolog, which at the time was nearly all film-based. At the time of the 1982 report, more than 500,000 miles had been collected. Film continued to be used throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. In Connecticut this 35mm film archive consists of approximately 11.5 million frames of photologged roadway and railway images, which were collected during the years preceding digital storage (19731996) and computer distribution at ConnDOTs research facility in Rocky Hill, CT. The overall objective for this study was to produce high quality digital images from the historical 35- mm film that are easily accessible to potential users at ConnDOT, UConn and any other Digital HIWAY user. This report documents the film transfer process and develops a film transfer workflow that may benefit other states as they begin to preserve and provide more access to their historical footage. Furthermore, upgrades were made to the image viewing software DigitalHIWAY and a stereo camera mount was developed to successfully capture 3D roadway imagery.