Capacity BuildingPassing on the Experience

Dr. Noha Adly

World Digital Library Arab Peninsula Regional Group meeting

Reaching significant milestones in digitization

With a focus on Arabic content

It all started at the BA Digital Lab…

The Digital Laboratory

The Corner-stone For Premium Quality Digitization

Well equipped for different types of media

Digital Laboratory

• Digitizing various media including slides in multi-formats, negatives, books, manuscripts, pictures and maps

• Digitizing Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s valuable collections

• Many of the Library’s projects are highly dependant on the digital laboratory

Digital Lab Man Power

• 120 staff members• Distributed over several teams• Working 7 days / week• 2 shifts / day• Working in many collections simultaneously

Workflow & Workflow Management systemare essential to control and track the process

What is a Workflow ?

• A workflow is a well defined sequence of operations, declared as work of a [resource]* during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one resource to another for action

– According to a defined procedural rules– Having an estimated time– Can be documented – Can be learned

*Resource: is a person, simple or complex mechanism, group of persons, an organization of staff, or machines

Digitization Phase

“Scanning”

Hardcopy is converted into raw

digital image

Processing Phase

Raw digital image is enhanced to realize: •Better image quality• Better OCR accuracy

OCR Phase

It extracts the text corresponding to the

processed image contents

Basic Digitization Workflow

Basic Digitization Workflow

For each phase, we need to:• Define the specs of the output (Quality)• Set the procedure of work to guarantee quality• Calculate the required time• Whenever possible try to Automate tasks• Set Benchmarks to monitor the progress

Why Workflow Management System?

1. Automation of task handling

2. Progress tracking

3. Process Management

4. Flexibility

1. Automation of task handling

Digital Assets Factory DAF(DAF is the digitization workflow management system)

2.Progress tracking– Workflow Tracking– Pending Items– Late Jobs– Employee’s Rates– Build Customized

Report

Digital Assets Factory DAF(DAF is the digitization workflow management system)

3. Process Management– Roles (Permissions)– Job Types– General Settings– Phases– Employee accounts – Workstations– Collections

Digital Assets Factory DAF(DAF is the digitization workflow management system)

4. Flexibility

Arabic Books Scanning

Arabic Books Processing

Arabic Books OCRing

Arabic Books Encoding & Publishing

Arabic Books Archiving

Arabic Books QA

Arabic Books Scanning

Arabic Books Processing

Arabic Books OCRing

Arabic Books Encoding & Publishing

Arabic Books Archiving

Arabic Books QA

Arabic Books Scanning

Arabic Books Processing

Arabic Books OCRing

Arabic Books Archiving

Arabic Books QA

Digital Assets Factory DAF(DAF is the digitization workflow management system)

Targeted Monthly Production Rate

≈ 5,000 books/month (1,800,000 pages)

HOW to reach the target?

Daily Rates (single shift)

– Scanning: ≈ 3,000 pages/person– Processing: ≈ 3,000 pages/person– Latin OCR: ≈ 4,000 pages/person– Arabic OCR: ≈ 2,100 pages/person

Monitoring• Rate/user (monitored during the shift)• User rate & Rate/shift report

Reporting• Weekly production• Monthly production

BA’s digital collections are maintained within the institution’s Digital Assets Repository - DAR

Digital Assets Repository

• Developed to facilitate the creation, use and management of the digital library collections.

• A repository for all types of digital material including slides in multi formats, negatives, books, manuscripts, pictures and maps, audio and video, thus preserving and archiving the digital media

• Provides public access to digitized collections through a web-based search and browsing facilities

Digital Assets Repository• DAR’s core consists of 4 fundamental modules:

– The Digital Assets Factory (DAF) ) http://wiki.bibalex.org/DAFWiki• Responsible for the complete automation of the digitization cycle• It was developed using open source tools

– The Digital Assets Metadata (DAM)• Keeps a unique and intact version of the digital assets’ metadata• Helps ensuring that cataloging, indexing, browsing, searching and retrieval are done

efficiently• In the latest version, DAM uses Fedora to manage the metadata.• Based on METS/MODS standards

– The Digital Assets Keeper (DAK)• A repository for the digital assets that are either produced by DAF or are directly

introduced into the repository.

– Digital Assets Publishers (DAP)• Components that publish and display the digital assets stored in DAK

– Book viewers– Search engines

Imparting Capacity BuildingSharing the BA’s technical expertise with external

organizations

• Yale University December 2007

Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library

• Municipal Administration Modernization (MAM) program in Syria March 2009

• Kuwait Institute for Science and Research “KISR” January 2010

ISIS has conducted capacity building workshops:

Capacity Building Scope

Passing on the experience of building an institutional repository to maintain the production of high quality digital assets in terms of digitizing, processing, OCRing, encoding, archiving and publishing based on well known standards.

Capacity Building Program

The capacity building program

• Overviewing BA/ICT facilities

(Digital Library, Internet Archive, VISTA, HPC, System infrastructure design, etc.)

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process

– Digital image parameters– Compression formats– Digitization workflow and phases

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing

– Enhancing image and text quality– Images rendering a good OCR

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance• Digital Assets Factory (DAF)

– Automation of the digitization workflow– DAF key features– Job life cycle

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance• Digital Assets Factory (DAF)• OCR

– Analysis of the input and classifying it to different fonts

– Automating OCR procedure

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance• Digital Assets Factory (DAF)• OCR• Online Storage

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance• Digital Assets Factory (DAF)• OCR• Online Storage• Library Services

– VTLS including its different modules– LIS servers and DB maintenance– OPAC and WEBAC customization– In-house developed systems

The capacity building program

• General tour over viewing BA/ICT facilities• Digitization process• Hands on Scanning and Image processing• Quality Assurance• Digital Assets Factory (DAF)• OCR• Online Storage• Library Services• Multimedia delivery framework

Disseminating knowledge in the digital age…

Thank You