Summary
Are your library services matching the expectations of your community ? Is the comprehensive documentation they need offered at their fingertips ? … most likely the answer is no, but how to move forward about it ? As more and more users simply ignore all material that they cannot read online, providing digital access has become a core service for most of the library managers. Would the most reasonable strategy be to start converting an entire library collection into electronic formats ? How easy/difficult is it to apply such a strategy ? Or could such a migration be done with some more intelligence, step by step ?
The first stumbling block we hit into is the copyright issue, but we should not despair – copyright agreements are negotiable, and the copyright holders might have interest in putting the content online, while they might not have sufficient interest to make the required resources available for digitizing old resources.
Another challenge for librarians is to select which collections are worth scanning;
should a demand-driven strategy be conducted to ensure that the converted material is
useful, or would a just-in-case strategy be more appropriate and less expensive ?
Then, how can a library trigger such a conversion ? Could the process take place in-house
or should it be outsourced to a professional company ? What are the
advantages/disadvantages of each option, expected costs and required expertise ?
And last but not least: which end result should be expected from the whole process ? How
to run it so that it will finally properly address the end users wishes ? In addition to
read access, are there additional functionalities that can be offered once the conversion
is over ? Initial questions like the scanning resolution, the character encoding, the
files formats, the OCR choice, the metadata extraction, etc can be answered better with a
clear vision of the users expectations. Finally, the integration and exploitation of the
scanned files by both the Institutional Repositories and by general web search engines
such as Gallica, Google Books etc. should be well understood.
The breakout group is intended for those who would like to share their experiences and
for those who simply would like to come along and learn before starting their own
projects. The conveners will describe their recent experience in this domain and how the
CDS-Invenio software has been used to facilitate some of these processes.
