Message-Id: <199612060937.DAA12938@library.wustl.edu> Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1996 10:29:46 +0100 From: Levine Emil <mailto:levine@NEPO1.IAEA.OR.AT> Subject: Re: Distributed Digital Library - German To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
I suggest you contact the US Library of Congress which has started a similar program. I do not have direct contact, but you might try web search on the LOC National Digital Library Program or contact Helen Mathura, 202-707-8609 or 8611 fax. She is the contracting officer on the project.Emil Levine Head, IAEA/INIS/Clearinghouse ---------- From: IMAGELIB To: IMAGELIB Subject: Distributed Digital Library - Germany Date: Friday, December 06, 1996 9:23AM
Dear Colleagues,
with beginning of 1997 the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) wants to promote the access to research materials via a new funding program, the retrospective digitisation of library materials. The aim is the establishment of a distributed digital library in Germany.
We are in the process of evaluating the state-of-the-art in the technique of digitisation. With regard to your experiences in the field of digitisation i would ask you to send me (per Fax, e-mail, however you want) some detailed informations concerning the following topics:
/1/ Scanning a) To digitise our older books we have to scan with a book-scanner (bound-material scanner)? Do you have experiences with this type of scanner (e.g. Minolta PS 3000, Zeutschel/Kodak)? Could you give recommendations?
b) First we want to scan text-books. Could you give recommendations concerning resolution, data format of image files (e.g. for long-time preservation, for distribution over the internet), compression, colour-depth, the tagging of image files (TIFF 6.0) (to give some informations like ,date and time scanned", ,artist", ,image description", ,document name", ,page number" and so on), the writing of (bibliographic) informations in the `comment-field' of the image file? Tests have shown, that OCR with older books (18./19. century) will cause problems. Do you have any ideas of dealing with this problems?
/2/ Administration and structuring of digital documents We want to administrate the image files with a Document-Management-System. Topics are the import (e.g. TIFF, JPEG) and export (html, PDF, SGML) of different data formats, the re-structuring of the documents by creating an electronic table-of-content, the use of the printed book index (e.g. subject, person) for the digitised book to provide the user the direct access to image pages. We are in contact with firms like IBM and Rank Xerox, who offer a kind of management system for digital materials (,Digital Library", ,XDOD/DocuWeb"). Do you have any experiences with this systems of IBM or Rank Xerox and do you know something about their functionalities and perhaps the further development of this systems? Do you have informations of konkret partnership between one of this firms and (research) libraries?
/3/ Metadata What kind of (bibliographic) metadata would you recommend to tagg with the digital document in a Document-Management-System? We think on the (automatic) import of bibliographic data from our online-library-catalogue.
/4/ Distribution and Access One way of distribution will be the Internet. Could you give recommendations concerning the compression of image files (GIF, JPEG?), the possibility of downloading not only pages but also whole chapters of a book, the designing of the `user-interface'?
/5/ Long-time Preservation The duty of libraries is both the distribution and the archiving of their materials. Could you give some detailed information of your concepts for long-time Preservation of a digital collection?
I hope you can help us to start with success our digital initiative for the german research libraries!
Thank you very much for your informations Best regards
Norbert Lossau (project officer) ************** Dr. Norbert Lossau Niedersaechsische Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Goettingen Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1 37073 Goettingen Tel.: +551/39-5217 Fax. +551/39-5222 E-Mail: mailto:lossau@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de