High-Volume Digitization Demonstration Charge

July 7, 2004

To: Barclay Ogden

From: John W. Tanno

Chair, SOPAG

RE: Investigation of a High Volume Digitization Infrastructure

SOPAG has been asked by the University Librarians to explore the feasibility of establishing digitization centers at the RLFs. This request grew out of a discussion of a proposal to develop shared print collections of government information at the May 7th joint SOPAG/UL’s meeting. One outcome of this discussion was that it might be better to invest what limited resources are available to digitize these print resources, rather than attempt to develop a shared print archive.

To explore the feasibility of establishing digitization centers at the RLFs, SOPAG would like to ask you to investigate what would be required to develop a high volume digitization infrastructure built around a robotic page turning book scanner.

Areas to investigate would include:

  • Robotic book scanners
  • The size and condition of materials that can be scanned
  • Production output per hour for these materials
  • Image quality and file formats
  • High-level productions steps (selection, preparation, scanning, editing, OCR?, saving to a server, etc.)

It would be worthwhile to investigate the infrastructure already in place at Stanford University and any other digitization centers that may currently be in operation, including consulting Joel Daavid at the SRLF digitization center. Would it be reasonable for you to provide an update on your progress for SOPAG’s September 17th meeting?

Thank you very much for your willingness to take on this investigation.