TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
The digital future for library books, pamphlets and journals
The University of Southampton has a collection of 1.5 million books and millions of pages of various archive materials – and wants to digitise as many as possible. The Library Digitisation Unit, headed up by Dr Julian Ball, is leading on this work, and also offers a scanning service to other libraries, archives, and the commercial sector. Alexandra Clarke spoke to him.
T
he University of Southampton began digitising a section of its library back in
2004, with help from JISC (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee), a charity that champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research. Under that project, materials from Southampton, the British Library and Cambridge University were brought together to digitise 18th-century Parliamentary papers – just over a million pages.
Digitising large collections
From 2007 to 2009, the university’s Library Digitisation Unit (LDU) digitised one million pages of 19th-century political pamphlets, which were collected from seven different research libraries and brought together as a unified collection.
After these earlier projects came to an end, the University of Southampton began digitising and making available, in an online repository, its own in-house collection of PhD theses. There are some 17,000 such papers, to which the university owns the copyright. The team has also started to digitise larger collections, such as the ‘Perkins material’ – books and periodicals from an agricultural library set up by Walter Perkins containing material from the 17th century to the late 19th – over 1.4 million pages worth.
The university had previously used a product called Abbyy FineReader, but that is more suited to digitising small numbers of pages. To expand its capacity for digitisation, the LDU upgraded to the Abbyy Recognition Server, which it integrated with its Intranda GmbH web-based workflow software, Goobi.
The LDU wanted to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when digitising material, to make it freely searchable. The new software allowed for automated, rather than manual OCR, and means, vitally, that readers can search one word and find the section or
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piece they wanted. Many old texts, such as parliamentary papers, do not include an index, meaning readers and students alike have a challenging job trying to find specific information in a particular place. Digitisation speeds up the process significantly.
Specialist skills
The university has no specific target on digitising its resources and materials, but the two core members of its in-house digitising team are now focusing on particularly difficult materials. The LDU uses up to six book scanners and one high-end line scanner to digitise texts and images from its collection.
LDU leader Dr Julian Ball explained: “We’re concentrating on publications or pamphlets that are hand-stitched or very difficult to open, so they have to be hand-scanned. That means the amount we can do per day is fairly modest: maybe up to 600 or 700 pages if we’re lucky.”
A new integrated workflow means data is automatically fed to the Abbyy system, the outputs are defined for the format required, such as PDF or JPEG, then Abbyy generates it. Dr Ball said: “That has sped the process up enormously. When you’re dealing with up to a million pages a year, it is a lot of files to manage.”
Easy access
The university aims to generate materials that can be integrated into other platforms, as well as cross searched from other platforms, and made searchable within one domain.
Dr Ball said: “More and more, the university students are requiring access to the materials and the catalogues in a digital format. They want that ease of access.
“With books that sit on the shelves, we may only have one or two copies, whereas we may have 60 or 70 students on a course. Digitising
those books, or providing electronic versions of journals, provides that easy access to the students.”
As a digitisation enthusiast, we asked Dr Ball whether printed books had a long-term future.
He said: “Digitisation will always complement them, and this is a strong part of that – but I think there will always be a place for paper material for research purposes.”
Global push
Many libraries and universities are working on digitisation projects, and there are also major schemes like the British Library Online Newspaper Archive, the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana digitisation collaborative, the Google Books Library Project, and bespoke ‘digitisers’ such as the British Library Publisher Digitisation Service.
These projects are collectively making a huge amount of material searchable, accessible and easier to catalogue.
Dr Ball said: “I think that is the most valuable part of digitisation: where we have collections that have become disparate, for example pamphlets, bringing them together as a collection so that they are searchable and accessible as well, that is a great benefit.
“It complements material that’s already there and being digitised by other universities all over the world. They can be put together, and the ideal is to hold them together more collectively for the future to make them as widely available as possible.”
Dr Julian Ball
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