Archives


services. We selected the debates as our first mass digitisation initiative because they are the flagship documents of parliament, and are heavily used in responding to research and reference requests. We are also digitising selected series of sessional papers (print documents tabled in the House of Commons each day) to provide immediate, broad access to them among parliamentary clients. This is, again, an entirely access-driven project. These documents are


Partnering with external organisations has been key, and has allowed us to gain valuable experience in mass digitisation


catalogued individually in our Integrated Library System (ILS), and currently housed on our ILS web server. Eventually, these documents will be moved to a consolidated institutional repository, which we are developing as part of our digital preservation strategy.


In addition, we recently acquired a book scanner and plan to run a pilot project to digitise


a selection of rare books and release them in EPUB format. This project will allow us to build a limited internal digitisation capacity and to develop our expertise, learning from concrete experiences of digitising rare book material so we can better define processes and standards.


Digital preservation As our focus is on parliamentary documents, we are working with books which are, in Canadian libraries, fairly widely available. As such, we do not approach the project as a digitisation- for-preservation initiative (in the sense of decreasing access and handling of a rare print original). However, protecting our digitisation investment through digital preservation is certainly a project requirement. Concurrently, we are building a small internal digitisation capacity for limited projects, and focusing on gaining experience, and developing standards and guidelines for digitisation. We may find in this programme that we come across materials that should be digitised in order to better preserve a print original, but that is not the main priority of our overall digitisation direction; access is. Internally, the Library of Parliament is in the process of developing a long-term digital preservation strategy. The strategy proposes a


and external


FEATURE


distributed digital preservation model among identified partners (including parliamentary organisations


partners) to


minimise cost, duplication of effort, and risk. The strategy proposes a five-year roadmap that progressively develops and implements the identified digital preservation programme components, including policies and governance, infrastructure and architecture, preservation processes, and change management.


Challenges For the library’s first mass-digitisation initiative, we have faced typical ‘start-up’ challenges: inexperience with techniques and technologies, lack of highly specialised skills in the field, and the ever-present issue of our resources not matching our aspirations. However, for a first initiative, our debates digitisation and portal development has gone very well. Partnering with external organisations has been key to overcoming our challenges, and has allowed us to gain valuable experience in mass digitisation while minimising the potential project risks.


Sébastien Tremblay is manager, preservation and parliamentary publications management and Sonia Bebbington is director of knowledge management and preservation at the Library of Parliament, Canada


Publishing at sea


Seth Cayley reveals the story behind the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition, which Cengage has recently digitised and released


W


hen Cengage released the Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004, an archive of more than 100 years of the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper,


it included a little-known addition, the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition, which was published on board the transatlantic liners that sailed between New York and Southampton between 1923 and 1931. Issues are extremely rare and are not held by the British Library, or available digitally from any other source. When the Berengaria set sail from


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo


Southampton for New York on Saturday 10 February 1923 it was carrying an entirely new cargo; the machinery, materials and men to create a daily edition of the Daily Mail newspaper for the ship’s passengers. What made this so revolutionary was that


the day’s news would be transmitted to the ship wirelessly from Britain and America, wherever it was in the Atlantic. The newspaper’s on- board staff would then work through the night to write the stories, typeset and print them, so a crisp edition of the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition could be waiting at passengers’ breakfast tables.


In the 1920s, as today, what made a newspaper a commercial success was the ability to attract advertisers. The five-day voyage provided a captive audience for a newspaper – and this was especially attractive, given the wealth of many of the trans-Atlantic travellers at the time. One of the key selling points of the paper was that it included stock exchange data. By striking an exclusive deal with the Cunard Line, and its sister company the Anchor Line


AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013 Research Information 13


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