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Creating Content: Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Digital Library Program. Martin R. Kalfatovic. Open World Leadership Center Washington DC Orientation Seminar / Library of Congress. September 28, 2007. Washington, DC.
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Creating ContentSmithsonian
Institution Libraries'
Digital Library Program
Martin R. KalfatovicNew Media Office and Preservation Services
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
● 20 branch libraries (New York to Panama)
● 1.5 million volumes; 50,000 rare books; 500,000 trade lit items
● ~120 staff
● Web presence since 1995
● 3 million web visitors per year
● 80% from outside the Smithsonian network
Overview of Library Digitizing
• Books are unique objects for scanning purposes
• Differ from 2 dimensional works (e.g. Photographs)
• Differ from 3 dimensional works (e.g. Artifacts)
Overview of Library Digitizing
• Codex has been around for over 1600 years
• The book format (title page, text, index, etc.) since the mid-16th century
• Web delivery of book objects has interesting challenges
Book Digitizing Process
• Bound materials– Quality issues– Protects the material
for future use
• Disbound materials– Generally better scans– Destructive
SIL Imaging Center
• Established 1999
• 2 digital scanning-back cameras– BetterLight– Phase I
• Flatbed scanners
• All Mac-based
• SIL has used a variety of commercial vendors for non- and semi-rare materials– Kirtas Technologies
(Robotic APT 2400 Scanner)
– Preservation Resources– PTFS, Inc.– Thomson– TechBooks
Digitizing Vendors
Digitizing Partner
Internet Archive• Scanning services• File Storage• File delivery• Technical development
Internet Archive HeadquartersThe Presidio, San Francisco
Digitizing Standards: Page
Images300 dpi, 24-bit color uncompressed TIFF, or lossless compressed images (e.g. LZW, JPEG2000)
Digitizing Standards: Page
Images● DLF Benchmark
for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials
● NISO Framework for Digital Collections
Digitizing Standards: Text
ConversionRe-keying or OCR with
correction to 99.997% accuracy
Digitizing Standards: Text
Conversion
Standard mark-up schema (e.g. flavors of XML like TEI or structured databases)
SIL Digitizing Statistics
• Approximately 400,000 scanned pages
• 700+ titles
• 1,100 volumes
Who Is Using the SIL Digital Library?• Sewing machine
enthusiasts• Researchers in Brazil• School kids around the
country• Lepidopterists in Peru
“Aloha. I live on the Big Island of Hawai’i …I’ve been looking for this text for over TWENTY YEARS. Mahalo nui loa for all your hard work. Reading these pages means so much to me and many others …”
Major Projects: Digital Editions
• History of Science• Natural History• History and Culture• Art and Design
Major Projects: Trade Literature
• Trade Literature Collections– Over 500,000 pieces,
only a small fraction digitized
– 30,000 images from two collections
– Among SI Libraries’ most popular sites with over 15,000 visitors per month
Major Projects: Image Galaxy
SIL Image Galaxy– Over 9,000 of SI
Libraries’ most interesting images
– Serves as a gateway for product development and licensing
– Assists students and teachers in locating images for use in the classroom and other projects
Major Projects: Scholarly
Publications
Smithsonian Contributions and Studies Series– Collaboration with
Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press
– Currently over 65,000 pages online with another 80,000 in FY 2007
National and International Partnerships
• Aluka– African history and
culture
• Open Content Alliance
Biodiversity Heritage Library
• 10 member libraries
• Goal: digitize corpus of heritage taxonomic literature (300 million pages)
• $3 million grant as part of Encyclopedia of Life in hand
www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Internet Archive Scribe Scanner
• Single Scribe Machine– Human operated– 200 volumes per shift
per week– ~ 70,000 pages from
a single machine per week
– Located in the Natural History building and working on BHL project
BHL Scribe Facilities
• Boston Library Consortium (Boston Public Library)
• New York Public Library• University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign• Natural History Museum
(London)• Smithsonian Inst. Libraries• Missouri Botanical Garden
(non-Scribe operation)
Digitizing Philosophy
• Digital Curation– Just as libraries keep
books, so do libraries have a mission to preserve “born digital” material
– Digital Preservation through assisting in the transmission of digital content to future generations
Smithsonian Digital
Repository
DSpace– Developed jointly by MIT
and HP
– Open source software used in hundreds of academic libraries
Smithsonian Digital
Repository
– Preserves and makes available digital output of scientists, researchers, curators, historians, etc.
– Coordinated with Smithsonian Scholarly Bibliography to track Smithsonian staff publications
Needs for Enhancing the SIL
Digital Library Program
• Petabyte storage system for source files
• Effective system for archiving of digital material (byte preservation)
• Enhanced capacity for storing/delivering web-deliverable images
• Central programming support for enhanced XML data delivery
Needs for Enhancing the SIL
Digital Library Program
• Implementation of Web 2.0 technologies
• Focus on reuse and re-purposing of legacy data and metadata
• Enhanced service to the various Smithsonian audiences (internal and worldwide)
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Image Credits• All book and material images available
through the Galaxy of Images (www.sil.si.edu/imagegalaxy)
• Other images by Martin R. Kalfatovic
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