As a trial, all the birth / marriage /death certificates that I have collected, plus other important family documents, have been scanned. The images are saved as both high quality (TIF format - 4 to 7Mb each) and compressed, lower quality ( JPG format - 300 to 900Kb) colour images.
This experiment has worked very well. The documents have retained all of their detail and the use of colour means that the results seem much more real than using black & white photocopies. Even plain, black ink originals look better in colour since even the stains and shadings of the paper come through.
If anyone can suggest a low-cost way of pooling document images (or sending the documents for scanning to a suitable location) and then making CDs of all / selected images available to others - please let me know. Even if interested individuals do their own scanning then it is worth agreeing on the size, resolution and colour depth to be used for interchange. So far I have scanned documents full size (8.5 x 12 inches or 216 x 306 mm for a typical English certificate) at 150 dpi using 24-bit RGB colour. This produces a TIF file of 6,739Kb and JPG file of 596Kb; if compression set is to 30 and smoothing set to 10 using Corel PhotoPaint's optimised encoding and 4:2:2 sub-format.
E-mail me - townsleyb at btinternet.com - if you have any comments.
Update October 2000 - The need to keep TIF files as well as JPG files has been found to be over-kill since the smaller JPG files can retain more than enough detail to reproduce the original document. Also the average birth / marriage certificate requires from 450Kb to 700Kb of disk space; based on a sample of 100+ documents and using the compression parameters given above. Files of this size can be sent over the Internet without excessive transmission time penalties. I am no longer producing TIFF images of any archived documents.
The web server at Tesco only allows me 10Mb of file space. With the growth of the Family History section this space limit became a problem. Some sections have now been moved to a second web site that provides a further 20Mb of file space. But even this is much too small for the large volume of digital information - mainly family photos - that I now have. Lucky the big volume items have no interest to a wider audience and do not need access via the web.
Instead I have created a much larger "web site" for access purely from a PC - using many common pages but expanded with photos and the scanned family documents referred to above. [One day I may even get as far as adding audio and video sections.]
These extended facilities and scanned family documents are only available as a "web site" recorded onto CD-ROM - with distribution limited to my immediate family for obvious privacy reasons. For CD-ROM users only - Family Documents