The original Birket Foster exhibit was installed in the Rare Books Room of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries in the early summer of 1998 by the late Charles W. Mann, Jr. The subject of the display was one of his favorite Victorian book illustrators. After Charley Mann's unexpected death on 17 July 1998, the staff of the Rare Books Room expressed a desire to see the exhibit moved on-line so that a larger audience of bibliophiles and friends of Charley's could see his last exhibit.

Through the efforts of Andy Biggans, Larry Wentzel, and Chris Holobar, the original illustrations were scanned using an HP ScanJet III/ADF color scanner and an Epson Expression 836XL oversize color scanner. The majority of the illustrations were scanned with only their captions. In some cases, the illustrations wrapped around portions of text they illustrated, so the entire page was captured, as this combination of text and image appeared before the reader in the actual volumes.

Minimal image editing was done to allow the images to appear in Netscape Communicator as close as possible to the original illustrations, using Image Assistant 1.0 and Photoshop 5.0 and 5.5. In some instances, the scanned image darkened near the gutter of the book. This occurred because the book could not be flattened sufficiently on the flatbed scanners to let the scanner catch the entire page evenly without doing damage to the book binding. In the interest of maintaining the current condition of the book, we allowed the "gutter shadow" to remain rather than altering the brightness and tone settings indiscriminately and thus changing the digital illustration from the original any more than necessary. These images highlight some of the difficulties and limitations when transferring a print exhibition to an electronic format.

Scanning and bibliographic metadata were noted at the time the images were scanned. The images were saved as 24-bit color JPEGs with moderate compression and sized to allow details in the illustration and fine print to appear legibly on a 17" color monitor, while minimizing the amount of vertical and/or horizontal scrolling.