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Digitisation conference 2007

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

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