Investigations of a Dog

This is a progress report on the First World War digitization projects I outlined previously in my post on planning.

Copyright:

I now have definite proof that the work of T. E. Sandall is in the public domain, so I can proceed with digitizing the main text of the book without fear of ending up in court. His death certificate confirms that Thomas Edward Sandall MD, Deputy Commissioner of Medical Services at the Ministry of Pensions, died at 2 Montalt Road, Woodford Green, Essex, on 31st May 1930. A notice of death in The Times carried the same information also noting that he was former CO of 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment, tying everything together nicely (I already knew that he was a doctor before the war, as well as being a Territorial officer). Therefore the main text of the battalion history has been out of copyright in the UK since 1st January 2001.

I still have no idea when Major George Harris Teall died, and since he was born in 1880 he could potentially have lived into the 1980s. If I can’t find out when he died, or if his work turns out to be still in copyright, it can easily be omitted. The postscript which he wrote deals only with the reconstitution of the Territorials in 1920, and while that’s probably an under-researched topic, it’s also likely to be less interesting to most Great War enthusiasts. The two works are treated separately on the title page and each is the sole work of its respective author, so I don’t believe that anyone could plausibly claim that the book as a whole is a joint work.

I was going to omit the plates, but there is now a slim possibility that I won’t have to. Steve Bramley and Chris Bailey, who are writing a new history of the battalion, would also like to use some of the photos in their book, so we’ve been discussing copyright issues. They might be contacting the publishers of Sandall’s book (Blackwell, so at least they’re easy to track down) to see if there is any record of the copyright holders of the illustrations. There might not be any record, or the copyright holders might require a fee for reproduction, but we can still hope that copyright has expired.

My contact with Chris and Steve has also shed new light on the family photos of my great-grandad. We need to look into copyright law in more detail, but it has been suggested that copyright in unpublished photographs created before 1957 expires 70 years after creation, regardless of the life or death of the author. If this turns out to be true, it automatically removes concerns about these photos, which were all taken in or before 1918. If it turns out to be false, it won’t be a complete disaster. The photos taken at Cottbus are credited to Paul Tharan, the camp photographer. He must have taken thousands of photos of PoWs, some of which turn up on ebay from time to time, but details of his life are surprisingly obscure. So far a request on the Great War forum, usually a mine of esoteric information, hasn’t produced anything. If I can’t determine copyright status I’m still prepared to publish the photos but take them down if a copyright holder appears.

Two of the wartime photos are almost certainly not by Paul Tharan. One has been identified (thanks to Chris Bailey) as the 5th battalion football team taken on the day of their match against the Grimsby Chums at Blundell Park on 22nd October 1914 (view photo). The other is of my great-grandad in khaki uniform (view photo). It was sent home after he was captured, but I can’t be sure when or where it was taken. In both cases there are no photographers’ names on the postcards. Although this makes it impossible to prove that they are definitely out of copyright (unless the 1957 rule is true), it also makes it impossible for anyone to prove that they are the copyright holder, so there probably isn’t much to worry about there.

Scanning:

All images have now been captured. Sandall’s book was scanned in monochrome at 300dpi, two pages at a time. This resulted in 132 images, taking about two to three hours. They are saved as JPEGs which take up about 1.5 to 2.5MB, depending on the amount of text on a page. I’m probably going to split them into separate files for each page, which won’t take long using batch processing as the position of the centre of the book is always more or less the same in every scan.

I decided to scan the family letters and photographs in full colour at 600dpi, keeping archive copies as uncompressed TIFFs. Photos can benefit from being scanned at the highest resolution possible, because enlarging them on screen can bring out detail which is invisible to the naked eye on the original prints. At the Great War forum there’s a whole sub-culture devoted to identifying units from internal evidence in photos.

Here are a couple of examples taken from the photos I linked to above. In this one I’ve enlarged the portrait of my great-grandad in uniform to show that he’s wearing a pocket watch in his left pocket, with what looks like a small cross hanging from the lanyard:

This is from the photo of the battalion football team at Blundell Park. You can see a uniformed soldier in the crowd, with what could be a Lincolnshire Regiment cap badge:

The only potential drawback with 600dpi TIFFs is file size: a scan of one side of a postcard is over 20MB! In this case the small size of the collection means there are no problems, but scaling the same technique up to a larger collection might be problematic. I’m not sure if it was strictly necessary to scan the letters at the same resolution as the photos, as all the writing would be just as legible at 300dpi and blowing it up beyond a certain point doesn’t really add anything. On the other hand, I found it convenient to keep the same scanner settings and scan the whole collection as one batch. This took about two and a half hours, resulting in 62 images.

Next Steps:

I want to do more background reading before I go too much further. I’ll also be playing around with various software, finding out what it can do and how to use it. And tomorrow I’ll be spending a whole day away from my computer as I’m going down to London for a seminar at the IHR on Cromwellian studs (it’s obvious what I meant).