About the Romance Comics Archive

General

This project was begun by Jenny Miller for English 379, Humanities Computing at the University of Maryland during spring semester 2001. This archive would not have been possible without the assistance of class instructor George H. Williams, who taught me pretty much everything I needed to know to make this site. Other valuable resources were Courtney Danforth and the university's Electronic Text and Imaging Center; Elizabeth Castro's HTML for the World Wide Web.; and Webmonkey's Photoshop Crash Course. I also appreciate the work of the web authors whose romance comic sites are listed on my links page, and Roger Sabin, whose book Adult Comics was most helpful.

The comics, by the way, are from my own collection, which I am buying on eBay.

Technical

[the following is adapted from the very cool (if you're into that kind of thing) Blake Archive]

Imaging

Scanning: Digital images are scanned from the source media: old romance comics. The scanner is a flatbed UMAX Astra 600S, using VistaScan DA version 1.2.2 software. It is attached to a Macintosh PowerPC 6500/250 running OS 9.

I began with a baseline standard for all scanned images of 24-bit color and a resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi), with the exception of a few comics, which were scanned at 500 dpi, and saved on CD-ROM as TIFFs. The images are not sharpened, corrected, or changed in any way. Basic image processing is done using Photoshop version 5.5.

File Formats and Archival Storage: Some scanned images (like Love Diary, Vol. 1 No. 47) were saved using the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) and archived as such on CD-ROM.

The images displayed to users in the online Archive are all served using the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, ISO/IEC 10918) format. Users are presented with an in-line image at 72 dpi.

Text Markup

All pages are marked up in HTML using Notepad.

Proposals

Here is a version of the project proposal.