PRODUCT FOCUS
discussions with authors also address what they want to do with the e-book royalties, with the option to donate to two charities, either Research4Life or INASP, which help provide scholarly-information access to developing-world researchers.
‘The majority of authors are really enthusiastic about the archive; it means that their book will never be out of print again,’ said Willems, who added that the main situation where authors do not wish their titles to participate is because they have already made their titles into e-books.
The process The digitisation work for the archive is being carried out by SPI in the Philippines, which also digitised Springer’s journal archive. ‘We send them our print books and they do high- resolution scans of all the pages separately,’ described Willems. ‘They use special scanners if a book is very fragile.’ After scanning the pages, the images are then scanned separately with different resolution and different contrast to achieve better quality. ‘We learnt the need for
that from doing our journal archive,’ said Willems.
After scanning, the team at SPI cleans up the pages and uses optical character recognition to obtain the text. Text recognition is a particular challenge where old fonts are used. Then there is extraction of all the metadata to enable searching. Willems noted that this is perhaps the largest step in the whole process. There are also several quality-assurance steps, at SPI, at an independent company and at Springer.
Formats
Once all this is done, the different formats are created. The majority of the books will be available as searchable PDFs, with an accompanying XML file that contains bibliographic information and references. ‘To the user, the book looks like the original – with the exception of the copyright page where we need to add an ISBN and DOI,’ Willems continued.
At the beginning, only a small percentage of books will also be available as EPUB
EVENTS LISTING FEBRUARY
Association of Subscription Agents & Intermediaries 2012 annual conference 27-28 February London, UK
www.subscription-agents.org
OCLC EMEA regional meeting: Developing A New Blend of Library 28-29 February Birmingham, UK
www.oclc.org/uk/en/councils/ emea/meetings/2012annual/
default.htm
Publishing Expo 28-29 February London, UK
www.publishing-expo.co.uk
MARCH
EDGE12: Pushing the boundaries of public service delivery 1-2 March Edinburgh, UK
edgeconference.co.uk
IPI-ConfEx
11-14 March 2012 Barcelona, Spain
www.ipi-confex.com
UKSG 35th Annual Conference and Exhibition 26-28 March Glasgow, UK
www.uksg.org/event/ conference12
La Santé 2.0 (Health 2.0) 29 March Lyon, France
www.adbs.fr
APRIL
The Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series 12-14 April Florence, Italy
www.casalini.it/retreat/2012_ docs/2012_Signup.pdf
London Book Fair 16-18 April London, UK
www.londonbookfair.co.uk
9th Annual Text Analytics Summit Europe 23-24 April London, UK
www.textanalyticsnews.com/ text-mining-conference-europe/
index.php
MAY
The Specialist Media Show 24 May
Birmingham, UK
www.thespecialistmediashow.com
JUNE
BookExpo America 4-7 June New York, USA
www.bookexpoamerica.com
Digital Book 2012 5-6 June New York, USA
idpf.org
ALA 2012 Annual Conference 21-27 June Anaheim, CA, USA
www.ala.org
LIBER Conference 2012 27-30 June Tartu, Estonia
www.utlib.ee/liber2012/index.html
To list your event here, please email the details to
sian.harris@europascience.com 24 Research Information FEB/MAR 2012
www.researchinformation.info JULY
EAHIL 2012 25th anniversary Conference - Health information without frontiers 4-6 July Brussels, Belgium
sites.uclouvain.be/EAHIL2012/ conference
Special Libraries Association Annual Conference 15-18 July Chicago, IL, USA
www.sla.org
AUGUST World Library and Information Congress: 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly 11-17 August Helsinki, Finland
conference.ifla.org/ifla78
SEPTEMBER
ALPSP International Conference 2012
11-13 September Birmingham, UK
www.alpsp.org
files. The books chosen for this will be those that are particularly popular or have many images. The EPUB files are made in- house from XML files. This development will echo plans for Springer’s frontlist, of which the publisher plans to roll out EPUB versions soon.
As Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media, commented at the announcement of the project, ‘Up to now, our past titles have been hidden away in our in-house library, but thanks to innovative technologies they can be made available again. At Springer, a book will never die, but “out of print” will.’
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32