Jeremy Leighton John, Principal Investigator and Project Manager for Digital Lives, mentioned "Site Photography, Video Walks and Interview" as part of the Enhanced Curation for Personal Digital Archives in the PDA 2011 Conference. I think we should follow in his footsteps of capturing images of the creative space of the donor as part of our practice in collecting personal archives.

Since I started doing high resolution photos 2 years ago (see my photo of Stanford Memorial Church taken on April 2009 at http://peterchanphoto.com/?p=5), I would like to develop his idea further to the taking of "high resolution" site photos as part of the Enhanced Curation for Personal Digital Archives. The main reason to have high resolution photos is that you can see more in high resolution photos as compare to lower resolution ones. The following photo has a resolution of 33,800 pixels. I believe you cannot read the titles of the books.

Here is high resolution photo of the same place containing 130 megapixels: (Some people have trouble seeing the photos in Firefox. If you have the same problem, try using IE or Chrome.)
Henry Lowood's Office

Now, when the photo is displayed at full screen, you should be able to read the title of the book "Steve Job". But, I believe you cannot read the subtitle because the font is much smaller. However, this high resolution photo allow you to zoom in the photo and display part of the photo in full screen. Now, you should be able to read the subtitle of the book: "The Journey is the Reward".

I hope this can illustrate the benefit of high resolution photos. If you are interested in taking such photos, take a look at this site:
http://www.gigapansystems.com/

Thanks to Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford , for letting me photograph his office. You may find part of Henry's game collection in the book shelve :-)

Peter Chan
Digital Archivist, AIMS Project