The Boston Tea Party with a Digital FlavorThe Digital Library Systems Group completed the final leg of it’s 2005 Digitization Seminar Series with the 2005 Northeast Regional Digitization Seminar and Meeting, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on November the 9th, 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts.
BOCA RATON, FL. November 18, 2005-
At the Meeting, elite members of the academic world in digitization discussed existing systems and processes, and areas of weakness in the current methods for digitization for preservation and access. Yale, Dartmouth, Boston U, Boston College, MIT, Univ. of Maryland, Iowa State and Harvard University were among the thirty-two institutions represented.
During the meeting, attendees reaffirmed that Opus (www.dlsg.net/opus.htm) provides all of the essential tools to perform simple and/or sophisticated digitization projects cost effectively. Opus’ eight well-defined workflow stages provide universities with what some referred to as a “paint-by-numbers” process. Also discussed was the need to customize digital library creation systems for some special collections and the desire to retain the “paint-by-numbers” characteristic for day to day operators of the system, further reaffirming Opus as the leading digitization workflow system.
In addition, we learned through extensive feedback from the large and growing body of users of digital collections that the majority are more concerned with providing easy navigation through the electronic volumes of a digital collection than with having the highest image quality possible. This opens the door for further reductions in costs of creating digital collections by providing automatic capture of structural metadata such as sections and pages. This is an exciting development in consensus among experts.
This is good news for the DLSG as well, as we had made a strong investment in this capability in 2004, but had not yet integrated it into Opus in order to continue to develop better image quality features. As a result of this meeting, this needed capability will soon be delivered to our current Opus users. As soon as this release is available, Opus will continue to be far and away the best system for producing digital collections.
The 2005 Northeast Regional Digitization Seminar and Meeting also included two fine guest speakers, Dr. Robert Cohen and Karen Lawson, representing R.I.P.M, The Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals and the Iowa State University Libraries, respectively.
The Dr. Robert Cohen, the founder and director of Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (RIPM) and Professor of Musicology at University of Maryland presented how RIPM is using a customized Opus system along with a WideTEK Super B scanner to create a digital collection of over 400,000 pages of music journals dated from 1800 to 1950. Dr. Cohen expressed that researchers using RIPM’s digital music journal collections require special navigation and search tools. In addition to illustrating the Organization’s extensive metadata compilation process, Dr. Cohen described how easy it now is to create cross-references between metadata and the digital journals, pages, articles and sub-articles using Opus’ straight forward user interface.
Karen Lawson of Iowa State University presented how the Knowledge Imaging Center (KIC) benefits Iowa State University’s faculty as well as students. She eloquently described the library’s introduction of the Knowledge Imaging Center as one of the most exciting that she can remember, stating that KIC “attracted almost 10 times the attendance of the next most popular introduction.” In addition, Karen Lawson also discussed how KIC serves as a shared resource in the library. that along with providing students with a wonderful resource for creating digital images, KIC allows their ILL department to fulfill the occasional request for color or oversized images, and KIC is available to their electronic reserves and special collections departments. Karen Lawson reaffirmed why so many universities and other organizations throughout the world have made the DLSG their digitization partners.
Another high point of the day was the introduction of the Bookeye 3 A1 Planetary Scanner, a new scanner designed to meet the special needs of digital preservation and creating digital collections. The Bookeye 3 A1 is a planetary book scanner with a large D size (24” x 36”) scanning bed. It provides a high quality full color 400 dpi resolution for ultra-sharp images, includes a built-in cradle and several state-of-the-art features including a gigabit Ethernet interface with Scan2Net® HTML protocol and cool white LED lighting that sweeps across the pages as they are scanned. Attendees were so impressed that several placed orders days after returning from the seminar. The first Bookeye, a black and white unit with a 17” x 24” scan area was introduced eight years ago.
Also shown were the WideTEK Super B high-speed, high-resolution flatbed scanner and a second generation KIC unit (Knowledge Imaging Center). The WideTEK Super B, with image quality that exceeds the high requirements of preservationists. Its high-speed scanning mode and low price made it a big hit with the representatives from ILL department. The KIC unit shown was the smaller, lower cost metal unit with the same performance, USB flash drive, email and FTP support and 17” touch screen as the high-end product that is completely housed in a beautiful wood cabinet. The user interface shown was one that was customized for Harvard University. A volunteer from the audience who had never used a KIC unit walked up and proceeded th scan with it in moments. was demonstrated Both units allow users to scan and walk away with images on a USB jump drive in less than a minute while offering email and two methods of file transfer of images to the user’s computer system.
For information on events that the DLSG is involved with your area, please feel free to contact The Digital Library Systems Group at Image Access.
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