Mass Digitization Group Meeting

Tuesday, August 1, 3;00pm - 4:00pm

Room 230B

AGENDA

• Discussion of the following proposal from Betsy Kruger and Tom Teper:

OCAers,

After our conference call with Bernie Hurley yesterday, I spent lots of time doing calculations and trying to figure out how we could possibly spend all this money effectively this year, given what would be our inevitable dependence on several other entities (OCA, O&M, Bidding/Contracts) to somehow miraculously ramp up fast enough for us to achieve this and to accomplish it successfully enough that we could insure additional future funding for mass digitization activities. It is hard to realistically imagine that we would be ramped up in all these areas any earlier than January 2007.

I began to think about what kinds of strategies we could employ this first year that would enable us to do several things: 1) spend the money; 2) lessen as much as possible our dependence on other entities to do their parts before we can even begin to do ours; 3) get our procedures and workflows developed and streamlined and our facilities at Oak Street ready for effective mass digitization efforts; 4) secure additional future funding. This morning I took my fledgling unformed kernels of various ideas and sat down with Tom Teper and we brainstormed the following proposal for our discussion and consideration at this afternoon’s meeting.

• Outsource to a variety of vendors who specialize in scanning particular types of materials, staying below bid limits, and utilizing existing signed contracts that already permit us to spend more than the bid minimum. Among these vendors are:

• Chicago Albumin Works for photographs—we already have a signed contract that would enable us to spend up to about $60,000;

• F Group—Tom’s already received an estimate from them; identify monograph collection that we could scan for up to about $28,000;

• Olive—Identify additional newspapers (or possibly the Ilios) for scanning again up to about $28,000 (caveat—Mary Stuart is already having some newspaper scanning done by Olive so we may be treading too close to appear to avoid a bid if we contracted another amount with them; Rod will have to advise)

• Praxess—Also up to about $28,000 (Tom, remind us of the format—microfilming fragile stuff prior to digitization??)

• Vidipax (AV materials) $28,000

• Spend some of the money on staffing

• Hire a cataloger to work on metadata creation ($40K)

• Staff/wages for prep work for all above outsourced work--$30K

• Fund some in-house scanning of large format and special collections materials (e.g., Valerie’s “Unica” idea)

• Allocate a chunk of change to upgrade the data and electrical capacities needed at Oak Street to support several OCA scanners (This is likely to be a couple hundred thousand)

• Spend some of the money on data storage

• By demonstrating success in the above smaller projects, developing our expertise, fine-tuning our workflows, readying our Oak Street space for scaled up efforts, and spending the $$ we've received this year, we then attempt to successfully obtain a second round of funding to really begin mass digitization efforts on or around July 1, 2007.

Tom, let us know if I forgot anything we talked about.

In addition to discussing the above proposal, we also need to spend some time discussing who is taking the lead on the portal project (Tim? Bill?), setting a timeline for the rollout of this project, and empowering the people who are taking the lead to hire the staff who were identified in the proposal to Steve Rugg.

MINUTES

1. Tim Cole agreed to take the lead on the Illinois Harvest portal development; Bill Mischo will be helping as well. Tim will get the process started for hiring staff. We discussed a date of October 1 as target for having the prototype portal ready to roll out; will list collections that will be coming later in the year.
2. Discussed proposal for expending our $900,000 drafted by Betsy and Tom. General strategy of the above proposal was agreed upon, but a few changes were made.

• We will allocate $200,000 for two OCA scanners/staff/scanning services. We will aim for January 1, 2007 as date to be up and running with these two scanners. Betsy will follow-up with Rick Prelinger to get this part of the project moving.
• Allocated the $900,000 into various budget items (See http://massdigiwiki.pbwiki.com/f/Mass%20Digi%20Budget.xls)

Next meeting: Procedures for selecting/vetting projects