diglib: Paula De Stefano article

[Robert Felsing <felsing@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>]

        Thanks to Carol for pointing out an appropriate and interesting
article.  It's worth the read.

        Differences in approach are probably moot since our digital effort
is now part of Special Collections.  Preservation is clearly a concern for
Special Collections, and the digital format provides a buffer between the
accidental destruction of irreplaceable material and the collection user.  I
have seen how fragile some of these materials are, and they will soon simply
be lost forever if something is not done to preserve them.  The digital
format is appropriate, and in probably most cases .pdf images are good
enough.  The 70-80% error rate is basically irrelevant -- unless there is a
high use collection that might be better served by text rather than image
data.  My only concern with .pdf image data is that conversion to another
format might mean re-doing a project.  It might be worth a (very) small test
to see if OmniPage Pro, a text processor, can read a .tif image taken of a
.pdf image.  

        Most digital library projects have focused on Special Collections,
and these projects are all over the Web.  Some are good; some are bad.  Most
are simply a curiosity since they lack the depth necessary for serious
research.  My sense after attending a digital libraries conference last
November is that there is a shift away from the digital library as an
appendage of special collections.  Michael Lesk of NSF commented that  "...
many librarians show up anxious to scan one particular collection that they
have treasured in their basement for decades, but often with a relatively
high price for converting a small amount of material that may only be
interesting to a few."  Similarly, the Japanese, who have plowed big Yen
into special collections projects are backing off this approach.

        Almost anything that plugs into a library electrical outlet can be
considered a digital library.  UC San Diego's Pacific Rim Library considers
itself a digital library because it subscribes to a large number of online
services.  The $700,000 midwest project to catalog Asian web resources is a
self-proclaimed digital library project.

        I would say that our Special Collections approach is a more
legitimate digital library project than the UCSD approach that simply counts
the number of subscriptions that it buys to online services; cataloging the
web is expensive and a maintenance mega-nightmare  (But a digital library
that successfully performs this cataloging function well is priceless).

        The e-Asia approach is simply a different read on building a digital
library -- but not that different.  The e-Asia database will ingest anything
from web sites to Spec. Coll. images.  It is not wholly a scanning
enterprise (although content creation is a very important activity).  It is
comparatively low-budget and directed toward the user community (the Spec.
Coll. audience is different -- a more specialized and largely external
audience).  The route taken by e-Asia is one that makes assumptions about
the future of electronic information; while I am convinced that the
assumptions will prove correct, there is no guarantee (hence our back-up
formats, etc.).  The Spec. Coll. approach, on the other hand, is
tried-and-true -- a route already well-travelled by most research libraries.
It is the approach arrived at by our predecessor body -- the digital library
task force circa. 1997 -- but never implemented.

Bob Felsing