EPISODE 2: "INSIDE DT" EDITION, Ben Cort Talks Technical Problem Solving in Cultural Heritage Digitization

EPISODE 2: "INSIDE DT" EDITION, Ben Cort Talks Technical Problem Solving in Cultural Heritage Digitization

What does it actually take to solve the toughest digitization challenges — in the field, under pressure, and with no room for error?

In this special Inside DT edition of Wider Lens, we sit down with Ben Cort, Digital Transitions’ Cultural Heritage Technical Support Specialist, for a focused, behind-the-scenes look at the technical expertise that powers preservation-grade digitization.

In this episode, we unpack:

• The real-world challenges institutions face when digitizing complex and fragile collections
•  What it takes to troubleshoot and optimize high-performance digitization systems
•  How technical decisions impact image quality, workflow efficiency, and long-term preservation outcomes
•  Lessons learned from working directly with institutions in the field
•  The intersection of engineering, photography, and conservation in modern digitization
•  Why experience and problem-solving matter as much as hardware and software
•  We also explore the human side of technical support — from unexpected edge cases to the mindset required to solve problems quickly and effectively in high-stakes environments.

This shorter Inside DT format highlights the people behind the work — the specialists who help institutions implement, maintain, and evolve their digitization programs.

Whether you’re running a digitization lab, evaluating new systems, or simply want a deeper understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, this episode offers a practical look at the expertise required to do this work at the highest level.

🎧 Listen now to go inside DT — and see how technical problem solving drives successful digitization programs.

And as always, we welcome feedback, comments, and questions. Let us know what you'd like to hear on this podcast, or if you'd like to be a guest. Email us at: widerlens@digitaltransitions.com

Additional Notes from this episode:

• Constantin Brâncuși Art: https://www.wikiart.org/en/constantin-brancusi
• DT's Online Digitization Certification Courses: https://heritage-digitaltransitions.com/dt-digitization-certification-program/
• DT's "Digitization Program Planning Guide" Bundle: https://heritage-digitaltransitions.com/product/cultural-heritage-digitization-planning-bundle-solutions-guide-digitization-program-planning-guide-pdf/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Wider Lens, a podcast from digital transitions. This series, we sit down with leaders from across the cultural heritage community to talk about the real work of digitization, what's happening today, what's coming next, and what it means for the people behind the project. Each conversation explores heritage imaging in practice, the technical challenges, evolving standards, and complex collections, but we also focus our lens on the human side, the stories, lessons learned, and moments that don't always make it into the conference papers or imaging specifications. Whether you're working in a museum, library, archive, corporation, university, or research facility, Wider Lens is a space to share experience, spark discussion, and think critically about the future of cultural heritage digitization. Let's get started. All right, welcome back to the Wider Lens, the podcast on digital transitions, where we explore technology workflows and people behind cultural heritage digitization. I'm your host, Patrick McDonough, the head of marketing for DT. This is a special Inside DT edition of the Wider Lens. Instead of a full-length conversation with a guest from our heritage community, we're focusing our lens on the expertise inside digital transitions itself. Uh these inside DT shows. Introduce some of the people behind the work, sharing a bit about their background, the kinds of problems they solve, and some of the interesting stories that come from working in this rich and fascinating world. Today I'm joined by Ben Court, DT's technical services manager. Ben spent more than a decade working in the professional imaging and cultural heritage field. He began his career at the Portland Art Museum, helping build their in-house imaging program, which grew from a volunteer effort into a core part of the museum's operations. Since then, he's worked closely with top institutions across the industry, helping them implement and maintain high-end digitization programs. Vin, thanks for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Awesome. Um, well, I guess to start with, for the people listening that have not met you yet, what exactly is your role at DT?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Yeah. So hi everybody. Um, so my role as technical services manager, I oversee the technical team and all of its functions. So I'm responsible for making sure that new clients getting onboarded receive purchases in a timely manner, responsible for making the consistent curriculum that we train all of our clients on. I'm responsible for making sure that the staff that go on site, if it's not going to be me, are all teaching and training our clients the same thing. Uh, and then all of the sort of boring minutia behind the scenes to make that all possible.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Awesome. Um, you know, on that topic about the training, one thing that comes up a lot when I talk to people in our field is how hard it is to get people trained up on cultural heritage imaging, um, and how there aren't a lot of resources for that. So I'm curious how you got into this. How did you acquire the knowledge you have? How did you get into cultural heritage imaging? Um, yeah, what's your background and what brought you here?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah. So, like you mentioned in the intro, I started out working at the Portland Art Museum. My degree is from RIT in professional photographic illustration. I focused on advertising. Which the basic delineator there was I wanted to learn how to light in a studio rather than talk about fine art. At RIT was a thing called imaging systems, which effectively is a two-year college course in what we all do now. Effectively, color management from capture through to print. Um, it was a lot of fun, but it introduced me into the more scientific side of imaging. Things like managing profiles, making sure that color looked good was relevant. But I had a lot of knowledge about input and output ICC profiles and XYZ transformation spaces, and none of that really made a lot of sense in taking photos of shoes.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, I mean, a lot of what you just mentioned for a kind of average commercial photographer probably sounds like gibberish.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yeah, it was definitely a thing that I could say, like, oh, I know about this, but beyond that, it wasn't especially useful. Um, so when I was getting ready to move out to Portland, um, I was put in touch with the woman that would become my boss, Maggie Hansen. And the museum had just gotten a state grant to start looking at what digital imaging would look like for the art museum. And I had we had produced a book, and it was basically a very similar to the DT digitization guides of how to do a full color managed imaging through print workflow. And I brought that to the conversation and I said, This is what I've been doing. And Maggie looked at it and went, Great, can you do this for us? I was like, Probably. Uh, and that was kind of it. I I started out as a sort of volunteer and part-time employee at the Portland Art Museum, and it quickly became apparent that digital imaging of museum collection objects was not a position that should or could be filled by a volunteer. And so there was a hiring search, there was you know, we had done all the right all the work, and I was uh offered a role with them full-time in 2016. And at that point, it was sort of off to the races.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

You've worked on the inside building digitization programs in an institution. Now you're kind of on the other side helping institutions solve problems. I guess one thing that I want to clarify so when people hear like technical support, they think of like a help desk or something. But what is it you're actually doing, you and your team day to day in terms of helping the type of organization that you used to work at?

SPEAKER_00 6:04

So there's certainly a little bit of that sort of help, my camera is making a weird sound or not turning on. And we we do absolutely support that. But because the team has a lot of skills like I have, where you know, I've been doing this a long time, I work with folks that have been doing this a long time. We're really able to assist clients and you know, folks that call in with much harder to answer questions. It's it's a lot of, you know, oh, we've gotten a grant project and we need help developing the workflow, or we've got this esoteric process that we need some help with, or you know, a lot of what we do with the webinars are born out of client questions, right? Things that, you know, I've got film, I don't know what to do with it. I've got this print, I don't know what to do with it. It's a lot of workflow requests rather than strictly help my thing is broken.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah, what the curious on what the split is between like helping install new systems, helping, you know, kind of set up facilities, helping set up new processes versus actual problem solving and troubleshooting. Like how how what do you think the percentage of your time is split? Or for the whole team, I should say.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I would say for the whole team, it's probably it's probably 60-40 by nature. We do end up resolving a lot of technical problems. But I think I would say 40% of our time is spent helping folks either set up or refine their their policies and their the way that their labs run.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah. I know I know it you know in most of our audience can relate to this. There's always new challenges and you know, material that doesn't fit the template of, you know, just falls outside of normal digitization workflows or or practices. But could you describe like what a typical day for you looks like?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Oh, a typical day. There are no there's there's never a typical day.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Um so I guess I would say, you know, I've got I've got two modalities of day, right? I've got a day in my office where it's a lot of checking in on the team, making sure that if there's questions that they're not able to answer, that I can direct them to the right spot. If there's questions that I can't answer, that I'm asking the right folks, um, spending a lot of time digging through old resources, updating them, making sure that our internal documentation is up to spec. I would say a big part of what I do on a regular basis is working with our sales team to make sure that, you know, they'll come to me with, hey, my this this prospect has a question about XYZ. I'm thinking about offering this solution. What do you think about that? And we'll have a conversation in that vein.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah, I think I think a lot of people maybe aren't aware that the DT's technical team is not just sort of post-sale support, but really part of the consultative process of helping our clients understand what it is they need and you know how to fit their particular solution or digitization department or program, whatever that is. And it, you know, the our technical team is a big part of that in helping guide those sales.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Yeah, I would definitely say that, you know, by the time we are on site, which would be the second modality of a day for me, you know, we we will have spoken with that client off and on for quite a while. I always think of an install day as like the the end of a really exciting process. And it's like, all right, cool, like we've done all this work. Here's the guy on site to do the actual project.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

And so that's gonna be the the second thing that you know, a typical day, because I I do spend a fair amount of time on site working with with new clients, getting them set up. But it is that is always really fun, and I do hold those days with a lot of I don't want to sound corny, but it's a lot of it's a lot of joy in that, right? It's like you know, I do 20 installs a year or something like that, maybe a little bit less in the past couple of years, just because I have a team to help out with all of that stuff, but it really is like this is the culmination of months or years of work on the part of the client. And so showing up and being like excited for that client to get up and running is a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Yeah, for sure. I think um it's fair to take a lot of pride in that. Like you said, the communication has has happened quite a bit. There's a lot of touch points and helping, you know, not just find the the equipment, but like solving problems and and figuring out the best way to implement it. And so the satisfaction in like, okay, here's the thing we've been talking about. Now we're actually gonna build it and set it up and and help the client. Because at that point, you know the client pretty well, you know, they're they're friends as much as clients and helping them get started about something they're excited to do with um it's gotta be a good feeling. Um that kind of brings me to the next topic. You know, I think focusing on so much of what you do is problem solving. Like you, like you mentioned, it's rare that an install is the same as the previous install. There's always little differences and little things you gotta figure out. So I want to talk about your kind of view on problem solving and how it is looking at the micro view and dwelling on like the small thing compare to like okay, stepping back and looking at the macro view and and how does that help in your problem solving?

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah, I definitely find that it's fairly common that the overall problem that we run into is caused by a step that we clicked right by or ran through. You know, the the joke problem of, well, did you turn it off and back on? There's a reason we always ask that as far as times I can think of where we've gone really deep and the problem is really basic. There was a case we had, I think a couple of years ago at this point, where we were communicating with a client via email. They were having a problem launching the Capture One software. It just would never launch. And the description that we got was the software just keeps crashing on me. It won't open. I open it and then it just goes away and I don't know what's going on. And so we dug in and we're deleting folders and we're reinstalling software, and it's just it's not doing what we expect it to do. And finally we were sort of like, Oh, well, let's let's look at wiping out the OS and restarting from scratch, which is a pretty severe thing to do. Anybody listening to this that works in an institutional IT department is is cringing and going, why is that where we got to? And you know, we we were chasing a rabbit and we're going all the way down the rabbit hole. And finally, we someone thought, hey, let's just really quick grab a screenshot of the last thing they see before the software crashes. And we got that back, and it was the login screen where you had to basically license the software. And so it was a in retrospect a rather humorous mistake that we'd overlooked. Where, of course, we've licensed and installed the software. Of course the software is activated, right? Like step one, install software, step two, activate it. And it was one of those things where you go, oh duh, of course that's what it is. But you know, we're so eager sometimes to dive in and assume that a challenge is really, really, really complex and it's really not. But but a fun experience that I've had. I my wife and I travel around a little bit, and we were in Japan a few years ago taking a train from this little small town back into Tokyo to get our flight home. And we get on the train and we sit down, we've got our bags all organized, we're ready for sort of a nice scenic train ride through the mountains. And a British couple hops on the train and they sort of are looking at their tickets and they come over to us and they go, You're in our seats. And I go, No, my ticket says I'm on this, I'm in the right spot, and these are our seats. And we sort of had this back and forth a little bit, and it was getting a little bit testy, you know, we're all a little bit at the end of our trips. You see, you've got that end of trip energy where you're kind of tired and not thinking real clearly. And so we're like, All right, you know, we're looking at tickets and we're trying to figure out like, oh, is it the right day? Is it the right train car? Like, what bypassing the thing of well, you they don't sell the same seat twice, so this isn't the problem. And the train starts going, and the train conductor is like trying to like mediate, and then this other person comes over and says, Let me see your tickets. And so I give this person my tickets, and the British couple give them their tickets, and he looks at the British couple and he goes, You're on the wrong train. And so they had the same seats in the same car for the train going the other direction. You know, I hold that as an experience in pretty high regard where I'm like, if we had stepped back and started at like the very, very like macro level, right? The overall view of the scene might have been able to get those folks on the right train out of there. So I find myself a lot of times just having to lift my view out of what I expect to be the problem and take a much larger view and establish what's going on here, what are the root causes? And so I try to project that to the team where it's like if you skip by something really basic, you suddenly can't rule out stuff the way you think you can.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah. And you know, I've I've definitely been on the end of that getting technical support in the end. You know, have you made sure it's plugged in? And it's like, well, yeah, of course I have anything you like. It's like, oh wait, actually, I didn't. I just assumed that it was, and I've wasted 10 minutes trying to figure out why something isn't working, and it was the obvious thing. So um, yeah, although it can seem it can seem silly to step through those simple things, but yeah, the the most basic assumptions, um, you know, if you don't check them, can can lead to way more extra work and and stress.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

For the the folks listening, um a big thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we make sure that the support and the service and the information we provide is approachable. And when I'm on site with folks, harping on the idea that no problem is too insignificant to reach us out to us about.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Um, like very simple problems are things that we can figure out quickly but might be a real challenge for you. Or, you know, at worst, it's the easiest part of my team's day, right? Telling reminding a client to unplug and replug a USB cable that resolves a problem that they've been stressed out about for a couple hours, that's great, right? That five minutes of our time solves a headache for somebody, that's great. I love that. Um, you know, worst case, it it's easy for us and you move on with your day.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

So you know, we talk about improvisation. I'm curious, I everyone I've talked to, like at all of our clients' digitization uh facilities. There's always, like you mentioned, like material collections that are sort of outside the box, different than normal. But what's your favorite sort of MacGyver tool or solution to whether it's setting up a system or digitizing a particular piece of material that was kind of weird or or esoteric? Like what's the favorite that you've seen so far?

SPEAKER_00 17:10

I think one of the things that I was most proud of working at the art museum, we were asked for the I think it was the hundredth year, the 125th anniversary gala. The art museum had a Brancusi sculpture, one of his Muse series pieces, and it was uh gold guilt brancuzi face. If you aren't familiar with his work, it's it's worth taking a Google of it. Basically, it's a chromed mirror, which is a whole challenge to photograph. And anybody in the in the audience who's a studio photographer would know sort of immediately that the challenges posed by a completely chrome sphere. And at the time, my my photo studio at the museum was a retrofitted art intake space with not a single planar wall. The ceiling was all ripped out, H back. It was really a challenging space to work. And so making this chrome ball of a sculpture present itself was a lot. It was three days of work with sheets of plexiglass that I stole from the prep shop and drilled holes in and mounted on various stands. Quite a bit of work with uh rolls of Westcott diffusion to make that all look like something. And at the end of the day, it was an image that I was really, really proud of. It got used on the invitation for that event, it got used on a handful of different things, and it was a really strong moment. But if you looked at what went into making that image work, it was an absolute nightmare of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, the reflective stuff. And for our listeners that aren't familiar, so Brian Cruise, it's spelled B-R-A-N-C-U-S-I, and I definitely recommend checking it out and seeing some of the stuff. I'm looking at this gold. I'm honestly at a glance, it kind of reminds me of like an owl or something, sort of similarly shaped, sort of owlish uh figurehead.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

It's uh 1920s contemporary sculpting. It's it's really it was a real joy to get to work with. That's probably a thing that I miss the most about working at DT is getting to spend a lot of time with hands-on with these art objects. I always joke with folks I'm doing installs with. I say, if you want tech support faster, send me a photo of nice art. If you lead a project with, oh, I'm working on this really gorgeous painting and blah, blah, blah. And well, I don't know what's going on. Here's a photo of a test target. It's like, no, I want to see the painting. Show me the thing you're working on.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yeah, absolutely. That's that's definitely one of the things I enjoy about DT. I remember one of the stories I tell my friends all the time. Um, we were doing a project with the Smithsonian. We were in the Natural History Museum, and I just, you know, asked our contact there, you know, where the restrooms were and walked down this long hallway and around a corner. And I passed by this lab, and it's an actual paleontology lab. And there's a big dinosaur skull just sitting on the counter, which is a wild, surreal thing to see. And um, there's an actual paleontologist wearing a white lab coat, like you know, dusting away at the skull. Uh so I poke my head in and just asked, Hey, can I take a picture of that? And she was super friendly. She she invited me in, she spent like 15 or 20 minutes explaining what she was doing. And I mean, you don't have access to that in normal life. So working at DT, just having access to those kind of things is really, really exciting, really interesting. Um, just to kind of wrap up our our conversation here, I'm just gonna fire a couple of quick questions to you and then and then we'll we'll sign off. But um so quick question. What's something you wish everyone listening knew that would save us all some pain, both the troubleshooting aspect and just like people in their day-to-day digitization world? What are what are some, you know, you talk about like simple solutions, stepping back, things like that. What do you want to share with everybody?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Almost every problem with an auto column not being seen by capture one can be resolved by unplugging the columns USB cable from the computer and plugging it back in. That's that's the one that's like everywhere I go, I'm like, this is the solution. It's never to power cycle, it's never to do a big recalibration. Most of the time, if you can't get the columns seen by capture one, unplug that that cable, plug it back in, we should be good to go. That's that's the big one that I I spend a lot of time chatting with folks about.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Yeah, that's funny. I think most people kind of assume like you know, power, unplug it completely, start it back up versus just the USB cable. I love that. Um, another quick one. What's something people would be most surprised about you and what you do outside of work?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Um, well, so in the winter I'm a big skier. I do a lot of backcountry skiing, which means we walk up mountains instead of ride chairlifts and then ski down. That's a good one. And then in the summer, I race uh various race cars at tracks up here in the Pacific Northwest. So I have Uh 1977 Datson 280Z that I've owned since 2012 and have way, way, way too much time and effort into. And I just recently with a friend of mine picked up a 2010 Lotus Evora that we're gonna be driving around in the the Northwest this year with a new uh a new race series up here.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Wow, that's that's that's amazing. I'm I'm slightly jealous of you doing that. I'm a big uh big Formula One fan, big car geek just in general. So yeah, amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Um I try to keep those pretty usually people find them exciting or incredibly boring. And so I try to not lead with either of those two things because more often than not, we get off onto a long tangent and you can just watch the other person going, like, all right, I want to be done with this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

So nope, all right, yeah. Our next conversation, we're just gonna geek out on on car stuff. I love that. Um all right. Well, Ben, thanks for joining me and sharing uh look behind the scenes at the work um you do and our technical team does. Um and thanks to everyone listening. This is the first episode in our Inside DT series, a little short conversation focused on the people and expertise behind digital transitions. If you enjoyed the podcast, we have more episodes coming up, um, both the inside DT format, the shorter episodes we have here, and our longer full-length conversations with members of the digitization community and cultural heritage, people that come and share their insights, their stories, um, and those we actually film live so you can join during the recording of the podcast and participate in the conversation uh in the QA and pose questions directly to our guests. Uh, right now we have on the calendar Michelle Gohan of Utah Historical Society on April 22nd, and Ben was uh just out at Houston uh Utah Historical Society helping them move facilities and was out there with Michelle, which is exciting. Um, we have Maggie Wins of NHL's Washington Capitals on May 21st, Martina Hoffman of the Swiss National Library on July 2nd, and Sierra Arazzo of the NASCAR Hall of Fame on August 27th. If you're interested in participating and joining any of those in our live recording of that, visit our website, digitaltransitions.com, and go to the events page, and you can register for free to join any of those. And of course, if you need more resources, articles, online training, and information about any digitization questions you might have, again, go to our website, digitaltransitions.com. And thanks, Ben. Appreciate the conversation. Yep, no worries, that was fun. Thanks for listening to Wider Lens, a podcast from Digital Transitions. We hope today's conversation offered practical insight into the evolving world of cultural heritage digitization, both the technical realities and the people behind the projects. If you have thoughts, questions, feedback, or ideas for future guests and topics, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out anytime at widerlens at digital transitions.com. And if this episode was valuable, please share with your cultural heritage friends, coworkers, and peers. Until next time, thanks for helping us focus a wider lens on the work that preserves our past and shapes its future.