2014 DLF Forum

Three project updates:

Managing the Digitization of Large Press Archives
Community Notes
Managing the digitization of press material is quite a challenge; not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of text and material quality, designing the workflow system which organizes the operations, and handling the metadata. This challenge has been the focus of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's digitization work during the past year in the course of its partnership with the Center for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ). Having more than 800,000 pages of press articles to be digitally preserved and publicly accessed, triggered an inevitable need to design a workflow that can manage such a massive collection and handle its attributes proficiently. The deployment of this endeavor required simultaneous intervention of four main aspects; data analysis of the collection, developing a digitization workflow for the collection at hand, implementing and installing the necessary software tools for metadata entry, and finally, publishing the digital archive online for researchers and public access.

The presentation will demonstrate the workflow system which is being implemented to manage this massive press collection, which has yielded to date more than 400,000 pages. It will shed some light on the BA's Digital Assets Factory (DAF), which is the nucleus upon which the digitization process of CEDEJ collection has been built. Additionally, the presentation will discuss the tools implemented for ingesting data into the digitization process starting form indexing until the creation of batches that are ingested into the system. The outflow will also be discussed in terms of organizing and grouping multipart press clips, in addition to the reviewing, validation and correction of the output. Light will also be shed on the challenges encountered to associate the accessible online archive with a powerful search engine supporting multidimensional search while maintaining a user-friendly navigation experience.

Session Leaders
Bassem Elsayed, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Ahmed Samir, Bibliotheca Alexandrina

AND

Audio and Video at Scale: Indiana University's Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative
Community Notes
In 2013, Indiana University (IU) launched a five-year project, known as the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI: http://mdpi.iu.edu/), to digitize and preserve over 300,000 audio and video assets of value from across the university. Among academic institutions, IU has an unusually rich collection of rare and unique time-based media that document subjects of enduring value to the university, State of Indiana, and the world. Pieces range from wax cylinder sound recordings of Native American music to performances by notable graduates of its Jacobs School of Music to media from the collections of IU's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

The project is co-led by IU's Vice President for Information Technology and Dean of University Libraries. IU is partnering with a commercial vendor, Memnon Archiving Services of Belgium, to set up a facility in Bloomington, Indiana to digitize these materials, in a workflow that will produce as much as 12 terabytes per day of digital data to be preserved beginning in summer 2014.

MDPI was planned out of recognition by IU leadership that large portions of IU's media holdings were becoming seriously endangered due to media degradation and/or format obsolescence. A 2008-2009 survey of holdings at IU Bloomington (http://www.indiana.edu/~medpres/documents/iub_media_preservation_survey_FINALwww.pdf) uncovered over 569,000 audiovisual items on 51 different physical formats held in collections of 80 different organizational units across the campus, with significant quantities of rare and unique items in danger of becoming inaccessible within 5-15 years due to degradation or obsolescence.

In this presentation, we will outline the goals and history of MDPI, describe the workflows that we are establishing to feed content into the digitization process and manage content coming out of the process, and discuss planned strategies for preservation storage, access, and metadata.

Session Leaders
Juliet Hardesty, Indiana University
Jon Dunn, Indiana University

AND

Building a Ten-Campus Digital Library Collection at the University of California
Community Notes
The University of California (UC) Libraries and the California Digital Library are nearing the conclusion of an ambitious project to build a shared system for creating, managing, and providing access to unique digital resources across ten campuses (see http://bit.ly/UCLDC).

The platform we are creating will have three major components: 1) a shared digital asset management system for librarians to centrally add and edit digital files and metadata, 2) a metadata harvest for digital resources hosted on external platforms, and 3) an integrated public interface so end-users can seamlessly search across these disparate resources. Together, these components will provide critical infrastructure for the UC Libraries to more efficiently, economically, and collaboratively manage and surface digital content. We will also be leveraging this platform to participate in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and we are investigating the possibility of extending it to facilitate participation in DPLA by additional libraries, archives, and museums throughout California.

This session will build on a "Community Idea Exchange" poster presentation from the 2013 Forum—at which point we had just begun the project—to describe in more depth the components of the platform and the technologies employed, as well as challenges to and changes in our approach since we embarked. One of the more interesting aspects of our technology stack is that we have opted to license and customize a vendor product for the digital asset management system with which the digital library community may not have much familiarity (Nuxeo, http://www.nuxeo.com/), and in this session we will discuss our experiences with it. We will also describe how our project and our platform will connect with other initiatives, most notably the DPLA, and may provide a piece of the technical infrastructure needed for institutions across California to share their respective digital resources.

Session Leaders
Sherri Berger, California Digital Library
Brian Tingle, California Digital Library