Digitisation in the UK and beyond
The JISC Digitisation Conference is due to get underway this week, in Cardiff
The conference blog has most of the details, including a link to the list of all speakers and presentations.
Among the speakers are Pat Manson (Head of Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning, European Commission), Richard Ovenden (Assistant Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford University) and Mike Keller (University Librarian, Stanford University)
In June I gave a presentation on Digitisation Infrastructure at the UCL Summer School of publishing e-content.
The presentation looked at some of the key capabilities that are required, whether at a campus-wide, regional or national level to make sure that digitisation happens effectively, as rapidly as possible and offers value for money in the medium and long term. Some of the key ingredients were:
The full presentation can be seen here
Some basic advice that many projects starting up could still do with learning
A reminder that there are still places at the Digital Preservation Coalition, British Library workshop on JPEG 2000.
The workshop takes place on 25th June at the British Library, London.
More details on the conference are available from the DPC website.
As reported elsewhere, version 4 of the the metadata standard for digital images, VRA (Visual Resources Association) has been released.
The British Library is hosting a conference on a topic which there is increasing digitisation interest, such as the BL’s own Archival Sound Recordings project.
According to the project blurb:
“Unlocking Audio is an international conference exploring the planning and strategies required for the successful execution of large-scale audio digitisation projects, and the technical and practical issues involved.”
The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA) at Queen’s University Belfast, and BOPCRIS at the University of Southampton are two of the leading digitisation units in the UK Higher Education sector.
Both are engaged in a wide number of projects (such as the Stormont Debates digitisation or the 18th-century Parliamentary papers and play an instrumental part in the UK’s digitisation infrastructure.
Most notable about CDDA is that has a good relationship with local students, providing them with skills and training to undertake data capture and processing work. The centre has around 5 or 6 flatbed scanners, 4 or 5 book scanners on tables and 1 larger book scanner for more difficult material.
BOPCRIS’s jewel is its robotic scanner which using suction power to automatically lift and turn pages before taking pictures. BOPCRIS also has 4 or 5 book scanners on tables and one larger book scanner standing on its own.
Both the BBC and the Guardian have run stories on an extraordinary digitisation project relating to ‘un-shredding’ Stasi Cold War spy documents
At the end of the Cold War, the documents were ripped into pieces, but archivists starting reassembling them because of their obvious historic value.
The task was accelerated when they started to digitise the pieces. To quote the Guardian
“The machine works by scanning the document fragments into a computer image file. It treats each scrap as if it is part of a huge jigsaw puzzle. The shape, colour, font, texture and thickness of the paper is then analysed so that eventually it is possible to rebuild an electronic image of the original document.”
This is an extraordinary process!
One can easily see plenty of other applications where the ability to analyse digitised materials could produce innovative and unexpected results - any kind of historical document where physical damage has eroded its meaning could be aided by extending this technology. One can also see the need for really complex metadata schema to ensure all the relevant technical metadata which informs the analysis softwares in place.
