Challenges
On the question of "vexing" problems, we find at least two categories of issues: technical and administrative. E.g., reducing the file sizes proved to be difficult with newspapers, as articles had to be broken up in order to attain legibility. (We will discuss the newspaper issue in great depth in our final report on what we find to be "best practices.") On the whole, learning to use the digital camera for newspaper text was vexing. A minor administrative annoyance was that the statistics form provided for logging hours of work was very difficult to translate to the actual tasks. For example, are scanning and optimizing images (with packages such as PhotoShop) two separate activities? This depends upon the workflow, the staff assigned to the task, and the material at hand.

A much more weighty administrative/political problem becomes evident when staff concentration is not dedicated to the project as a temporary, full-time effort. That is, attempting to learn new technical and communication skills while retaining responsibility for daily operations proves problematic, frustrating, and unnecessarily slow. The University of Washington Libraries relies upon cross-functional but ad-hoc teams to accomplish many projects. When new technologies and skills are demanded, the learning curve becomes steeper when staff cannot focus on the project.

Goals
Our project goals include learning how to use a digital camera for oversized objects. Although we learned the best ways to manipulate folio-sized, bound documents, we will not have determined definitively whether this is a feasible approach for large-scale projects in the future. The essential roadblock we face in that regard is the limited quality of the digital camera we have. The Canon 2000LE is capable of recording 1200x1400 pixels, and was the "top of the line" for consumer (cf. professional) quality cameras at the time of purchase. As technology improves and price/performance becomes more satisfactory, it is likely that the method will increasingly become appropriate, however insufficient was the power of our consumer-grade camera.

We will also not have time to thoroughly test speed and legibility of texts transmitted within the region; indeed our sample was, of necessity, only within the Seattle area. The notorious "last mile" problem is not borne out within the city, but we suspect that in outlying counties we may find bandwidth insufficient to transmit and display our images in satisfactory time. We did confirm that platform deficiencies would still prevent some Seattle Public Schools from making efficient use of materials, even when optimized for size and transmitted over very fast connections. For example, some schools are saddled with obsolete workstations that cannot run intensely graphic applications or the latest browsers due to lack of processor power or shortage of RAM.