This week we’re exploring one of our most exciting projects and developing partnerships right now –the digitization of PRISM international!
PRISM international one of the oldest literary magazines published here in Vancouver by the Creative Writing Program at UBC. A quarterly magazine established way back in 1959, PRISM’s goal, as stated on their website, is to “publish the best in contemporary writing and translation from Canada and around the world.” Writing from PRISM has been featured everywhere from Best American Short Stories to The Journey Prism Stories. Past published authors including Canadians like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, as well as famous international authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Seamus Heaney.
With such amazing material, we are thrilled to be working with PRISM on digitizing their entire published collection! We even have a special intern assigned to the task – Yoav!
Yoav began by dis-binding, also known as chopping up, the more available copies of PRISM, before feeding them into a special multipage scanner – if you’re interested in seeing the process behind this check out our blog here.
Dis-binded PRISM magazines
The rarer copies were scanned on a larger scanner that is set up to take pictures of each page without breaking the magazine into pieces.
More recently Yoav has begun to work on Photoshop editing each page for optimal quality and to input metadata on each magazine. Good metadata is important! One might even call it– A Love Note to the Future.
All this will take awhile but, according to Yoav, it’s definitely worth the wait. “This is one of the most exciting projects to work on… with really interesting visual art, and poems. You just stumble across cool things.” He explained. “When I was scanning I even made a short list of things I’d like to read later [from PRISM].”
When all that work is finished a huge treasure trove of art, poetry, and stories from around the globe and closer to home will be available online!
Even better, PRISM is going to be one of our ongoing partnerships. This means that each time a new PRISM magazine comes out we will be digitizing that and adding it to our collection. So be a peach and keep checking back for more information!
