Pepys collected most of his ballads in five volumes with approximate dimensions of 358mm x 340mm. Most of the volumes are approximately 70mm thick, with Volume 1 closer to 100mm since it contains earlier ballads which are on heavier paper. The individual ballads were trimmed to fit into these volumes, and EBBA provides the dimensions of the trimmed ballad on the citation page for each ballad.

The ballads have been digitized from negative 35 mm. second generation microfilm purchased directly from the Pepys Library. Negative microfilm scratches less easily than positive microfilm over time and therefore the images tend to be cleaner. The microfilm has been digitized and the images have been cleaned by the company Softfile in 400 dpi TIFF high-resolution output. 400 dpi was the highest available image resolution scan and was considered an archival standard at the time that the ballads were digitized (in the summer of 2004). While 600 dpi scanning is now becoming widely available, we believe that the 400 dpi resolution represents a sufficient archival quality scan for the ballad artifacts in the Pepys collection. Because black-letter ballads are simple works artistically, there are no gradations of color or even subtle shadings of grey to enhance: these are black and white documents printed on cheap linen paper that contributed to the smearing of ink. As such, a 400 dpi resolution will continue to insure a usable shelf-life well into the future.

Raw TIFF files were then processed by the early modern technical team. Pepys had often cut early, large, two-part ballads into half-folios and pasted half on each page of facing leaves in his volume. To recreate the ballad as it looked in the original, the team pasted these two-part ballads back together in Adobe Photoshop. Troublesome blocks of text were also sharpened to render them more readable. Then the images were saved in two versions: an uncropped Pepys page that leaves the white space around the ballad as it appears in the album with Pepys’s numbering, and a more tightly cropped image that allows more of the ballad to be displayed on a computer screen. Each of these versions is also saved in three sizes: a thumbnail (roughly 150 x 125 pixels), medium (roughly 600 x 400 pixels) and large (roughly 1440 x 1115 pixels).

Each image will finally contain a complete set of imbedded metadata encoded using the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) standard. The XMP standard for imbedding image metadata has recently been officially adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by several major standards generating organizations, including but not limited to The Dublin Core and The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). XMP provides a mechanism for customized collections of metadata to be stored as an integral part of a digital image file. The adoption and implementation of the XMP standard insures that, even if image resources are linked to and/or saved outside of their original Web context at the Early Modern Center, they will contain a digital watermark that includes all relevant copyright, production history, and bibliographic information in a form that is recognizable to all major software applications. When the project is completed, there will be three versions of both the medium and large images: two in black letter, one of the uncropped Pepys page and the other of the cropped Pepys page, will show the original aesthetic form of the ballad with its original black-letter typeface and the third, in Roman type, will show the same original aesthetics but with a white-letter (or roman) transcription in place of the black-letter text.

To create the facsimile transcriptions, or roman type images, an image team has been trained to use Adobe Photoshop to cut out the black-letter sections of each ballad and replace them with the appropriate transcribed text. The team will follow line breaks and text size convention in the original as closely as possible so that the resulting facsimile transcription will resemble the original ballad. All ornaments and woodcuts adorning the ballad will be left untouched, thereby creating a version of the ballad that is easily read, even by those untutored in black letter, without losing any of the cultural and artistic impact of the ballad as an historical artifact.