Seeing Both Sides: Handling Content on the Back of Photos

The structure of image records varies between repository platforms, and different platforms have unique ways of presenting image content. We will briefly discuss record structure and the image display interface in ContentDM, Islandora, D-Space, and Digital Commons. Next, we will explore the Paul Sargent Image Collection on Digital Commons at Eastern Illinois University. Digital Commons allows one primary image file per image record. This presents a challenge when there is valuable content on the back of a photograph. We will explain how we used Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Acrobat to address this common characteristic of older archival photos such as ones in the Sargent collection. In order to meet this challenge and effectively present the digital images, we employed a strategy of bulk processing the creation of a single image file containing both the front and back sides of a photograph.