Streamlining Mass Digitization for Archives Materials

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Streamlining Mass Digitization for Archives
Materials
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• The Promise of Digital Archives
• Changes concept of rarity
• Reduces barriers to access
• Increased functionality

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• The Challenge of Archives Collections
• Inefficient research sources
• Lack of common and consistent structure
• Variety of formats, sizes, colors
• Fragile

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Over 1 Million page images. Diverse collection
(in subject and format) of materials drawn from
26 campus UW System
Wisconsins Pioneer Experiencefirst person
narratives from 19th century Wisconsin, completed
20022245 pages in 23 collections - 24.8 minutes
per page or 7.32 per page (includes 150 hours
of transcriptions)
Wisconsin Goes to Wardiaries and letters from
Wisconsinites during the Civil War, completed
20042492 pages in 28 collections - 8.87 minutes
per page or 1.60 per page.
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• Streamlining A New Model

Scan from photocopies
No item level metadata
Ada Lois James
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• Streamlining A New Model

EXPERIMENT
Reformatting Streamlined 51.6 seconds
per page Control 5 minutes per page
CONTROL
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• Streamlining A New Model

Metadata Streamlined 36 seconds per
page Control 3.12 minutes per page
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Control
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Item level metadata no longer distinguishes
each document. It largely repeats the issue
level information
Streamlined
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• Streamlining A New Model

Total Streamlined 1.8 minutes per page
0.33 per page Control 8.68 minutes per
page 1.53 per page
Ada Lois James
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• Assessment Methodology
• Study of seven undergraduate history majors,
  seven library science graduate students.
• Participants completed six tasks using both
  control and streamlined sections of the Ada James
  on-line collection.
• Participants were then interviewed about their
  preferences and expectations.

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• Early Analysis
• Asked about ease of use of the two models. Scale
  - 1 (very difficult) to 5 (easy)

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• Early Analysis
• Browsing
• In order to effectively BROWSE papers, students
  desire more metadata, not less, about individual
  letters.
• Some comments about streamlined model browsing
• Waste of time
• Youd lose me at ten pages Id do this only
  if it is something I was really
• interested in

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• Early Analysis
• Searching
• Most students report desire to search over
  browsing. Wish to conduct Google-like
  searching, with simple understood search results.
  Would prefer full text searching but would
  accept searching across abstract metadata.
• Some comments about searching in both models
• Searching was frustrating
• I assumed everything was searchable
• Put up a disclaimer

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Early Analysis Asked about to rate the
navigation and searching. Scale - 1 (very
difficult) to 5 (easy)
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Early Analysis When the comparative costs were
explained (five times as much stuff for same
amount of money), most respondents stated that
the streamlined model was acceptable. Some
comments Better than not having it at
all. Better than driving an hour away This
(streamlined approach) may turn people off from
using primary sources.
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Early Analysis When asked about how likely would
they consider using the source for future
research. Scale - 1 (least likely) to 5 (most
likely)
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• What OCLC can do to continue
• Develop a better method to browse a collection of
  papers.
• Maximize searching capability by experimenting
  with ways to achieve a better full-text index.

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• What OCLC can do to continue
• Browsing
• Would a graphical interface help students?
• Can the isolation of individual documents be
  automated?

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• What OCLC can do to continue

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What OCLC can do to continue Searching Do the
photocopies effect efficacy of OCR? Are there
different products that can more accurately work
with older documents? Can they be
developed? User supplied transcriptions?
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Streamlining Mass Digitization for Archives
Materials