In fact, these images have not been scanned directly from the original photos, but instead, are JPEGs created in a batch process from the analog videodisc - the first edition of People of A Thousand Towns - created by YIVO in the 1980s with a funding from the Charles H. Revson Foundation.

We chose this method of digitizing the images because it was the quickest and most cost-efficient, and made it possible for us to convert People of A Thousand Towns to a public access Internet catalog in less than a year.