Challenging our understanding of Digitisation
At the forthcoming Developer Happiness Days one of the sessions planned to take place will be exploring a DIY digitisation workflow:
Taking you from the act of scanning images and objects, learning how to process and edit them with software like ocrupus, blender and OpenCV, storing and manipulating them online and finally, through to printing their digital forms out, mashed together with comments, citations, automatic qr codes and even other digital objects!
While this session is not intended to showcase the same results one would expect to find on large scale institutional and heritage digitisation projects, the session might just force a consideration of digitisation practices and trigger off some interesting questions and dialogue.
So, if this confrontation with digitisation sounds interesting then there is an opportunity for attendance at this session by project members from JISC digitisation and eContent projects.
Spaces will be limited, so please contact me directly if you wish to register your interest: b.showers@jisc.ac.uk.
And to find out a little more about this session you can read Ben O’Steen’s blog and his ideas for the “The Secret Life of the Book” session at the event.
And further information about the Dev8d programme is available on the Developer Happiness website
#dev8d
How to digitise newspapers
As phase 2 of the British Libray’s newspaper digitisation programme prepares to conclude (1m more pages are due to be added in the coming months), there are some interesting reports about the digitisation process becoming available.
The project’s final report looks at the issues such as the capture of metadata, the standards used, and the complex workflow developed. It also gives detailed information on which newspapers have been scanned are being added to the collection
Readers may also be interested in Simon Tanner’s article in dLib magazine, which goes into greater depth on how to measure the success of OCR technologies, and the methodologies required for such work.
It also worth comparing the digitisation of the British newspapers with other sites around the world
USA’s National Digital Newspaper Program
Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program
A fuller list of international digitisation projects for newspapers is available at the International Coalition on Newspapers site