Electronic images

[Paul Scott]

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History has recently been involved in
several publication projects utilizing scanned images.  Most recently
with our monographic series ("Taxonomic Atlas") of the marine
invertebrates of the Santa Barbara Channel.

We insert TIF images directly into our publication files (although JPEG
images would work fine too).  The files are "printed to file" and
transferred via Bernoulli disk to our commercial printer.  The printer
takes our files directly, eliminating the need for "original copies."
The results have been excellent, with extremely high quality printing at
a fraction of the cost of traditional offset printing.

To my knowledge, no zoology journals use this approach, but one hopes
this technology will become widespread in the next year or two.  I have
however, submitted photographic plates of electronic images printed on a
1200 dpi printer to a journal and the illustrations were accepted.

Paul Scott
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
2559 Puesta del Sol Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93105 USA

inverts at sbmnh.rain.org

> I am involved in an arthropod survey project in Costa Rica, and part of
> that project involves capturing jpegged images of specimens and storing
> them in a database. Through this I have become a fan of digitized images,
> and I have been particularly impressed with the quality of SEM images. I
> am also impressed with the fact that digitized SEM images are free
> (following startup costs) while photographic film is definitely not. My
> question is, can the photographic step be avoided when it comes to
> publication? (of course, when taxonomic publication is electronic, this
> question will not be relevant). Do any journals accept electronic images,
> rather than the cut and pasted polaroids? Is there a way to convert
> digitized images to a form acceptable to journals? I expect this topic
> has been much discussed somewhere, so even if someone can direct me to an
> archived or current discussion would be appreciated.
>
> Jack Longino, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA 98505
>