In my experience it's the upfront labor (including impact on existing staff) and long term labor and maintenance costs that prevent large scale digitization in both small, medium and large institutions, not the initial capital costs of the hardware and software. If Mellon funded an entry level position with the package then you would see a high level of interest.
Rich Rich Cherry Director of Operations Skirball Cultural Center 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90049 Work: (310) 440-4777 Fax: (310) 440-4595 rcherry at skirball.org -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Christopher J. Mackie Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 3:06 PM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] Low-cost digitization rig 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 -- 282 Alexander Rd. Princeton, NJ 08540 -- 140 E. 62nd St. New York, NY 10065 -- +1 609.924.9424 (office: GMT - 5:00) +1 609.933.1877 (mobile) +1 646.274.6351 (fax) cjmackie06 @ AIM cjmackie5 @ Yahoo -- http://rit.mellon.org; http://www.mellon.org _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
