The Digital Blog

Dear friends,

There are currently a lot of questions being asked about mass digitisation workflow. Most of them refer to the technical side of things – hardware, software, input, output and so on.
Here’s a piece of advice gleaned from 10 projects with more than 1 million digitised items:

The no. 1 subject matter is logistics. Get a grip on it, or you will lose control of the critical issues.

In other words: you need to know – at all times – exactly where every physical item is and what processing step it’s currently in. If you do not have this information, you will not be able to react swiftly in any given situation, much less manage a full-blown crisis. So make sure your technology is able to display the status quo of the entire project as well as the single item – otherwise you will lose a lot of time and hence money, and maybe even your job.

What else to keep an eye out for?
Take care to establish that your material can actually be scanned (it might be too large/small/fragile/old&valuable/weak print etc.). Then be sure the items you want to digitise are compatible with your soft- and hardware.
Yes you can digitise books with a book scanner, but can you also scan the book’s oversized foldouts? If not, how and when will you be able complete your digital collection – and at what additional cost? Also please take into consideration how many different scan interfaces you will need if you decide to use three different scanners. The list goes on and on…

Believe me, in the past five years we have spent more than 400 working days finding answers to these questions – so I know that the success of any project hinges on dealing with them in advance. Think about this and make sure you can tick every box on your check list before you start. It’s this sort of preparation that will make your project a success!
Claus Gravenhorst

Da mag man sich noch so anstrengen, aber ohne Google geht nichts mehr.
Es fehlt nur noch, dass ich beim Sex die nächste Stellung mal schnell “google” um mich dann mit ungeahnter Kreativität auf meine Frau zu stürzen.

Viele Bereiche des Lebens werden mittlerweile von und durch Google beeinflusst und dieser Einfluss wächst mit jeder neuen Initiative, der sich die “don´t be evil” Leute widmen.
Nicht nur, dass in RSS Feeds jetzt G.-Anzeigen auftauchen, sondern jetzt packen sie sich auch noch den letzten unvergoogleten Anteil von Publikationen. Zeitungen.

Author: Claus Gravenhorst
at Colloquium of Library Information Employees of the V4+ Countries

Accessible information is a basic need of the society or to put it another way … of everyone. Usually the original can only be accessed in printed form or microfilm/microfiche, which means search, use and distribution of the information is time-consuming, cost-intensive and not available for everyone. The digitisation and conversion of printed items into electronic formats were, until recently, complex and cost-intensive. Insufficient budgets and/or resources prevented extensive transformations to digital repositories. Reliable methods for long-term security and the storage of these enormous data sets were virtually unavailable.

As the result of the METAe project (http://meta-e.uibk.ac.at), funded by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Research Program, CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH, Germany developed a comprehensive software solution, available on the market since 2003 under the brand name docWORKS. It is a production tool, which offers an integrated workflow for automated, structured conversion of printed documents into digital objects, which describe the physical and logical document structure by consistent use of international XML standards. These XML documents are to be equated concerning quality and structure with born digital documents and can be transferred to digital library systems, portals, document, content and knowledge management systems as well as virtually any media output device.
The main goal achieved through the project was the automatic generation of administrative, descriptive and structural metadata. The advantages of highly structured documents:
As “digital original” they meet the requirements for a digital long-term storage in repositories
With the use of XML open metadata standards, the data can be transformed and migrated to meet current and future requirements (more…)

http://www.bnf.fr/pages/catalog/num_masse.htm

The National Library of Norway has taken the next important step in their digitization programme. While the process of digitizing all documents ever published in Norway is still in progress, the Library has now put online their first books. A large amount is available for free and can be accessed at www.nb.no/sok . Currently the search interface is only available in Norwegian. Search can be performed via keywords inside the fulltext, although no hit highlighting is possible at current stage. Why not connect and play around a little bit? To view books online, please make sure to hit “Digitalt innhold – Ja” and “Materialtype – Böker” on the top left tool bar. [FK]