Digital Technologies and Access At Cornell University

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Digital Technologies and AccessAt Cornell
University

• Peter B. Hirtle
• Cornell Institute for Digital Collections
• pbh6_at_cornell.edu

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Overview

• Describe some of the activities of CIDC
• Lessons learned
• Projects are more than just scanning
• Collaborative projects work well

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What does CIDC do?

• Explores the use of digital technologies in
  teaching and research

• Cornell focus, but with a broader perspective
• Educates, through workshops and publications
• Digital imaging workshops DigiNews D-Lib
  Magazine

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Representative projects

• Image collections
• Slide libraries Japanese theater Contemporary
  African Art Birds
• Textual materials printed and MSS
• Textiles and costumes

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Museum Online project

• collaborative project with H. F. Johnson Art
  Museum
• digitize 25,000 objects in the museum
• purchase of high-end digital cameras
• staffing and systems support
• two year time frame
• add subject terms to public access catalog

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SagaNet

• Collaborative project with the National Library
  of Iceland
• Scan 400,000 manuscript pages, 100,000 printed
  pages
• Create a comprehensive resource for Saga studies

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Making of America

• Previous Cornell project to scan 750,000 pages of
  19th-century journals
• New project to OCR and index the text, provide
  word access to the contents
• Available at

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Lessons learned

• Projects are still difficult no off the shelf
  solutions
• Projects involve more than just scanning
• Only a small portion of the tasks

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Importance of the full digitization chain

• Benchmark capture requirements
• Purpose
• Preservation? Access? For how long?
• Nature of documents
• Capture and conversion
• QC is hardest part

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More digitization chain

• Metadata creation
• File management and storage
• Backups, migration
• Network infrastructure
• Display derivatives
• Output options print, etc.

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2nd Lesson Learned Importance of Collaboration

• Almost all our projects involve collaboration
• Museum, slide libraries, faculty, Computer
  Science, other schools
• Not a natural act
• Differ over access, fear of loss of control

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Value of collaboration

• For maintenance and support
• Museum Project is one example
• Library provides technical support
• Bits are bits
• For technical exertise and advice
• no one has all the answer
• SagaNet good example

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More benefits to collaboration

• To create an integrated resource
• Cant think in terms of collections
• Cant think in terms of repositories
• Researchers use everything
• As a service to users

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Summary

• Digitization is more than scanning
• Need a commitment to the full digitization chain
• Recognize that your level of indexing will
  probably be higher than before
• Collaboration can be an effective way to decrease
  cost and increase value