Hi all; I'm writing today on behalf of Mellon's IT funding program (not
our Museums and Art Conservation Program, which is a different entity).
We're looking at an opportunity to fund a different kind of digitization
project, and I wonder if I could ask for your thoughts about its likely
usefulness in the museum/cultural heritage communities?
What we've got in mind is a digitization rig for small or medium-sized
2D digitization projects. The project would use off-the-shelf hardware
and open source software, packaged carefully to be extremely easy to set
up and use, even with no prior training. It would be able to handle
almost any kind of 2D material up to a certain size (books, flat pages,
images) non-destructively, would OCR the results, and would then deliver
the documents as special, searchable PDFs that could reformat for any
display devices (i.e., the text would 'flow' so that you could, e.g.,
read on your iPhone without having to scroll side-to-side or flip
pages). Let me emphasize that it would be built to be operated by people
with no digitization training whatsoever: staff, volunteers, students,
etc.
The system would be easy to set up and self-calibrating; it would use
pairs of consumer-grade cameras ($250-500) from any of several
manufacturers. The software would run on any standard PC or laptop
(Mac/Win/Lin), support one-button operation, provide automatic page
de-warping, include automatic OCR, allow computer-assisted addition of
metadata, and otherwise be set up to produce professional quality output
even when used by complete amateurs. We anticipate the final cost of all
hardware and software (including the cameras and PC or laptop to run
everything), to be sub-$2,000.
As you can infer from the above, this is not a system for digitizing
fine art at very high resolution, but it is a curation-quality
digitization system for text, whether diaries or handbills in a
historical society or books in a museum library. Our goal is to bring
digitization to the "Long Tail" of smaller collections out there in the
world that are of potential cultural significance but where the likely
audience is not large enough to attract the big, for-profit
digitizers--or where the value or fragility is such that the works could
not leave the institution to be scanned. Think of it as "Google Books
for the Rest of Us...." :-)
I'd really appreciate the thoughts of those of you who know museums and
cultural heritage organizations well, on three separable questions:
1. Does anyone know of any other project, currently available or in
development, that might deliver the same functionality and
price-performance?
2. If we build this, will institutions come? Are there many institutions
out there with collections (including museum libraries) that their
leaders would like to digitize, and which have labor (in some form)
available to do the work, but for which the capital costs, expertise
requirements, or other challenges of the current technology are the
limiting factor?
3. If institutions do take advantage of this service, will they make the
resulting content freely available? (I'm not looking to rehash barriers
like copyright, but rather to solicit information/thoughts that bear on
the *willingness* of museums and cultural heritage organizations to
publish such content freely.)
Two logistical matters. First, may I ask that replies go to the list
unless you really need confidentiality? I'd like to get as many
different views as possible, including responses-to-responses. Second,
please note that I'm soliciting feedback on these questions, not
proposals or offers to be a test site. If we do move forward, I think we
may indeed want to invite institutions to become test sites, but if so
I'll be back in touch via the MCN list: I'm not prepared to start a
wait-list today.
(I'm also asking these questions of our friends in the library and arts
communities, so apologies in advance for any redundancy in your inboxes
:-)
Thanks! --Chris
Christopher J. Mackie
Associate Program Officer
Research in Information Technology
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
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