Conference 2007: Feedback from Day 2 afternoon parallel sessions

With Sarah Porter, David Dawson, Emma Beer, Brian Kelly, David Dawson and Julian Ball

Brian Kelly: transforming the user experience

scenario planning - web 2.0 is the environment many of our users will expect to see their services delivered in - this is happening if look in key user communities - can be real benefit for us in making our resources available in places our users are at - they will expect to access them in those type of environments - radical proposal
Adrian Arthur, BL: summarised approaches - web 2.0 a key aspect in strategic plans, need to optimise scarce internal resources by using some of these tools - use of wikis for in-house development, blogs and Amazon-style recomendations - but web 2.0 inhouse rather than ‘out there’
Alison Russell, MSpace: impotance of popular web 2.0 services and popularity of light web 2.0 development tools but maybe we also need semantic environment as well
not too much concern about that scenario in the discussion - have to avoid missing the opportunities

Julian Ball: OCR challenges

Ali Conteh talked about mass digitisation of newspaper project, Martin Locock and Welsh Journal, JB
all saw the benefits of OCR to allow people to have access to the data and enable searching rather than just images of the material
Bopcris point is that OCR can provide for the visually impaired and hard of hearing
all the projects challenged in a variety of ways - hard to distinguish between columns of text, with Welsh have problems with the accents, with 18th century texts have ligatured which are difficult to comprehend
early days, all mainly using Abbey 8 or the old English version, all projects have a high throughput and moving away from re-keying and correcting the OCR and saying ‘this is the best we can do’ and maybe use fuzzy searching to get over some of the difficulties
perhaps we can drive forward the development of new OCR tools and then redigitise in the future - need a stimulus from the community

Emma Beer: legal landscape

concentrated on project focus - what processes need to be followed to clear rights - a contract is always better than a letter - need to think about high and low risk and taking high risk very seriously and thinking about when can run a red light but bear in mind it’s the institutions liability - and understanding the implications of taking a risk even when low is more than legal, may affect trust relationships

David Dawson: centres of excellence

Kevin Guthrie: Ithaka, parallel with JISC resource centres
Anne-Marie Millner: 12m users a year, aim to support small institutions
BN for Pat Manson: competence centres and the EU
lot of guidance needed for external companies and need to benchmark costs - project run by MLA northeast to train people in SMEs about the cultural sector - how to define what a centre of excellence is

July 20, 2007 | Filed Under Digitisation conference 2007

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