Digitisation

Europeana Newspapers is a project funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP).
The total project budget comprised €5.2 million, with a max. EC contribution of €4.1 million. The project consortium brought together a total of 18 partners, coordinated by the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin).
Over a duration of 38 months, starting in February 2012 and running until March 2015, the project strove for:

Elmo, Big Bird, and friends are being digitized as part of an initiative to preserve and make accessible more than 2,000 videocassettes housed in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s collections. The “Sesame Street” tapes are from the archive of Tony Geiss, a longtime staff writer and songwriter for the classic children’s program.

This blog will introduce text capture by describing the different methods with a focus upon historical documents. I will introduce the basics of OCR and rekeying with discussion of handwriting and voice recognition.
What is text capture

The 2and3D Photography conference was a big success. Over 265 delegates form 22 countries filled the Rijksmuseum auditorium for two days. The atmosphere was lively. The Twitter reactions to the #2and3D program were very positive.

The conference closed with a discussion on the Amsterdam Principles. The delegates present voted unanimously in favor of the principles, which means that we – the heritage photography community – took a major step forward regarding our communal future. Standardization will guarantee the quality of all aspects of our work.

When the university library digitises printed books from heritage collections, it uses software that converts the pages to digital text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The software interprets the printed information and makes it searchable. With handwriting, HTR technology – handwritten text recognition – is used instead. It is the development of this technology which is creating something of a race among researchers worldwide.

ecently on Inside/Out, we heard from Assistant Media Conservator Peter Oleksik about MoMA’s efforts to preserve and digitize its collection of analog video art, amassed over the course of four decades. The heroic undertaking of digitizing over 4,000 videotapes was absolutely critical for preservation and access purposes. However, when we digitize analog videotape, we have just begun a new chapter in the artwork’s life, one that is rife with grave challenges and risks that are unique to digital materials.

At the end of 2013 the Trove team at the National Library of Australia embarked on an exciting project to bring Trove’s current affairs coverage into the twenty-first century. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio National (RN) website exposes a wealth of contemporary content on cultural and political life in Australia. We knew that if we included these resources in Trove we could give users a current affairs discovery experience starting with the first Australian newspaper printed in 1803 and continuing all the way up to the podcasts of the present day.

n the last post we looked at Why a digital preservation strategy is necessary. This post outlines a few of the steps we are taking here at the Digitization Centre to enact our preservation goals.

Planning for preservation starts at the creation of our digital objects. We need to choose digital formats that are suitable for the long-term and follow best-practices for their creation. There are many factors that go into the choice of formats, for example check out the detailed information from the Library of Congress.

The European Commission monitors progress in the area of Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation of Cultural Material. This 2014 Status Report shows that there has been an increase of digitisation plans and overviews of digitised material, more cross-border collaboration and public-private partnerships as well as pooling of digitisation efforts through competence centres or specific aggregators.

FADGI format comparison projects. The Audio-Visual Working Group within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative recently posted a comparison of a few selected digital file formats for consideration when reformatting videotapes. We sometimes call these target formats: they are the output format that you reformat to.