The National Archive’s digitisation project, British Governance in the 20th century – Cabinet Papers, 1914-1975, has been grappling with issues of “useful” OCR. It might be stating the obvious, but accurate OCR is as useful as the search results it produces. If OCRd text consistently misspells particularly relevant key words for retrieving certain documents, than […]
Month: January 2008
As part of its Digitisation Programme, the JISC appointed consultant Hervé L’Hours to assist the 16 projects in defining their metadata requirements. In particular, Hervé looked at issues relating to technical / preservation metadata and how these were being built into project workflows. The bulk of this work took place between June and November 2007. […]
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Digitise a book in 15 minutes!
JISC recently met with representatives of QIDENUS TECHNOLOGIES, who are prototyping new robotic book scanning technologies. QiScan RBSpro is a fully automated robotic scanner that uses a robotic rubber “finger”, and no suction technologies, to turn the pages of a book. The “finger” senses the type of paper and the machine sets the right angle […]
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects. That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google. It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb […]
As well as digitising several thousand sound files, the British Library Archival Sound Recordings project has made multiple digital images of record and music players from its artefacts collections. This includes gramophones from the 1890s right up to Sony cassette decks from the 1970s. The players have been photographed from multiple angles, allowing for the […]
The JISC-funded 19th Century Newspapers digitisation project was highlighted in today’s Guardian as part of a growing number of online newspaper archives which constitute an invaluable resource for historians and researchers. Stephen Hoare commented: “The digitisation of the British Library’s 19th-century newspaper collection – the most comprehensive archive ever to go online – was launched […]
Developing International Collaboration for Digitisation: the JISC – National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) perspective Hosted by King’s College London. Monday 21st January, 5.30pm – 6.45pm (Room 2B08, Strand Campus) With presentations and commentary from Bruce Cole, Chairman, National Endowment for Humanities Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC Paul Ell, Director, The Centre for Data Digitisation and […]