RelTech adheres to the highest standards available. We use an archival format that digitizes each page of your project (including covers) at 600 dpi. This very high resolution format  provides the basis for future conversions to new preservation formats when they appear. High resolution TIFF images are currently the medium from which many people generate preservation quality microfilm. Although there is still significant debate about whether digitization can ever be a preservation medium, there is considerable agreement about the desirability of utilizing high resolution TIFF images as the archival format for digital images. At the current time there is a great deal of debate about standards and guidelines for preservation of digital texts and images. 

The standards to which RelTech adheres developed out of earlier discussions about creating a digital archive for paper journals, and though our thoughts have moved well beyond those earlier musings, the importance of creating digital archives has always remained one of the core components RelTech. Many early digital projects in the humanities have created image archives of books and manuscripts, and they have experimented with different formats and resolutions. Based on the findings of several of these projects, the Library of Congress has created a World Wide Web style guide outlining their recommendations ( http://lcweb.loc.gov/webstyle/fileform.html). For printed textual matter, they suggest that the archival quality images be in TIFF format at a resolution of between 200 and 400 dpi. However, it has been our experience that 600 dpi TIFF images are preferable.. At this resolution, even the smallest footnotes in documents can be readable. This resolution is also sufficient to record illustrations, line drawings, and even photographic reproductions that are present in the journals we plan to digitize. 

A debate is currently raging in the archiving community over the question of whether a digital archive is really an archive at all, since most digital storage media degrade rather rapidly over time. Perhaps more significantly, technology is advancing so quickly that even if twenty-year-old media are still intact, they often cannot be read, because (1) no machines that are capable of reading the media still work and (2) software doesn't exist to convert from the older format to formats that are used today. The solution, many archivists say, is to continue using microfilm as the archival medium of choice. 

However, we are convinced of the viability of digital archives, and we consider the images and/or encoded text stored on electronic media to be just as important to archive as the microfilm. Unlike a microfilm archive, in which the camera master is stored in a vault, where it might remain for up to 500 years, a digital archive must be refreshed periodically to ensure that the media on which the images are stored are still valid, and the formats must be updated as new formatting standards are developed. A digital archive is thus somewhat more difficult to maintain, but it has a number of advantages as well: ability to produce as many perfect digital copies as needed without degradation of the original, much quicker copying time, and much lower storage costs. 

In a time of dramatic turmoil and change in the field of scholarly publishing, we believe that RelTech is in a unique position to assure the survival and growth of the scholarly literature of religion .  By using 600 dpi TIFF images as the archival format for your project, RelTech insures that your project can be preserved at the highest standards developed for the preservation of digital collections. 
 

Specifications

Color TIFF Images - 600 dpi, 24 bit color, Photometric Interpretation: Contiguous RGB, Compression: LZW, Bits per sample: 8, Samples per pixel: 3. 

Black and White TIFF Images -  standard 1 bit black and white TIFF images at 600 dpi. Photometric Interpretation: Bilevel (0=White), Compression: CCITT Group 4 fax, Bits per sample: 1, Samples per pixel: 1. 

Sample  ETANA