Via the iris – Betsy Brand and Sarah Waldorf, August 17, 2016: “Hundreds of thousands of artworks, objects, books, and records in the Getty’s collections have been photographed and posted online. But how do objects go from the physical world to your screen? People. Holly McGee is one of them. Here’s what a typical day in her life at work iThe s like. A trained librarian and archivist, on any given day Holly is either photographing a single book or performing image processing. She can typically digitize two books a week from cover to cover. On photography days she meticulously sets up her station, checking the camera’s focal range and performing a color calibration, and then gets to work shooting hundreds of pages. Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Holly has been hard at work on the letter copying books of M. Knoedler & Co., which fill 205 volumes and span six decades, from 1878 to 1940. These books are a spyglass into the inner workings of one of America’s preeminent art galleries at the height of its influence. But with crumbling leather bindings and pages as thin as insect wings, the books have been deemed too fragile to be handled by researchers—so it’s up to digitization assistants to translate every outgoing letter into digital facsimiles for scholars to virtually explore…”