...newbie questions - programming and archival ...

[earlj moniz]

Hello Blacklight movers and shakers, and our favorite Latin lurker, et al.,
Programming Background 1:  We are preparing to bring on a Linux guru contractor to our government history office before too long to implement our Blacklight solution...
To this point, the last four years or so, we've collected and compiled our collection in Adobe Photoshop along with attached metadata ... to this point in our preparation, we have no real concern for extracting metadata from Photoshop; I've no doubt what I am asking can be done, it's really a matter of someone doing it before and sharing an extraction method...

Programming Question 1: Is there a method to extract the metadata from Adobe Photoshop images... and other products as well... pdf documents, InDesign documents and files, and audio files from Adobe Audition? I imagine there isn't anything that can't be extracted with the proper knowledge and skill in open source coding and such (neither of which is currently readily available in our office - which initiated our contracting endeavor) - but it would be nice, once he is aboard, to give him some assistance with sources for extracting metadata without having to start from scratch...

Archival Background 2:  As I composed the previous portion of this message, one of the historians hands me a box of b/w negatives. The box is from WWII. It is branded with Lumiere ... indicates the number 100 - the number of negatives in the box, I imagine. The size of the negatives is indicated as 71 X 115 which converts to 6.5 X 10.5 mm (my own measurement)... The box itself was previously sealed with a label indicating LUGDA and the indicators UN 11, normal (papier) and brillant (blanc). I can differentiate the emulsion side from the substrate side fairly easily for most of them... I do see some fingerprint burns on some of the edges of a few negatives.

Archival Question 2:  Is there a way remove the fingerprints without damaging the slides? How?
Archival Question 3:  Is there a way to clean these without damaging them?
Archival Question 4:  There is a bit of silver substance on the negatives as well. Anyone have an idea what that is and how to remove them?  Silver nitrate perhaps?
Any help, hints, tips, and leads are appreciated... a few of you may have been, or are now, archivists...

I understand these latter questions might not be appropriate here... if so, I will take them elsewhere... responses may be emailed directly to me to avoid clogging this forum... any flames as well...

Thanks for any help...

Until that time...  Earl J.