Once
the objects for a desired digital collection have
been sought, found and selected, barcoded ‘pull
sheets’ can be printed and the objects gathered
for digitization. With physical object in hand,
preservationists can select a metadata template,
modify the template to perfectly fit the object,
print barcode metadata sheets and insert them in
front of the pages that they correspond to, then
submit the volume for scanning. Or, all metadata
work can be postponed until after image treatment
has been performed and OPUS has made a first pass
at identifying metadata, automatically.
From
the exotic and sophisticated, automatic page turning
scanners to Bookeye, WideTEK and even Epson scanners,
OPUS supports virtually any scanner that provides
sufficient quality for the desired output. OPUS
either runs the scanner directly or can be configured
to automatically import images from the scanner.
Automatic
image treatment consists of numerous functions,
including book-fold correction, ‘two up’
page splitting, de-skew, content location, application
of fixed margins, color correction, and de-speckle.
The
manual image treatment stage allows all pages to
be reviewed and any that is not processed to the
desired quality level can be reprocessed using manual
and semi-automatic processing. When the page is
acceptable, the user advances to the next page.
OPUS
offers an automatic metadata capture system that
looks for common metadata such as book title, author,
publisher, table of contents, section and chapter
names, and page numbers.
Automatic
metadata capture is a wonderful concept, but expecting
a software program to know what’s what is
a tall order, especially with artificial intelligence
still in its infancy. So, the Digital Library Systems
Group at Image Access invested substantially in
software engineering to produce a facility for efficiently
reviewing and editing the results of the automatic
metadata. Not only can text be changed, but the
actual metadata elements can be rearranged or deleted
and new elements added.
Once
an object has been processed to this stage, derivative
creation can be a fully automatic process. It is
at this stage that high, medium and low resolution
PDF, JPEG, TIFF and other image files are created.
In addition, metadata is output to any number of
custom formats and
to standard formats such as METS XML.
Release
is the final stage of OPUS. It can be as simple
as copying the files to a special directory structure
or as complex as a sophisticated relational database
on a SQL server.
