Mass Digitization Group

Monday, July 31, 2006

Conference Call with Bernie Hurley, UCBerkeley, and Scott Miller, NRLF

• Beth gave Bernie and Scott some background on how we came to join the OCA
• Northern Regional Library Facility scanning center doing scanning for northern California university libraries; SRLF scanning center is scanning for southern California university libraries. NRLF more established; SRLF just about to come up
• Scanning center at NRLF is run by Internet Archives; SRLF is hiring and supervising staff for scanning center down there; contact person is Colleen Carlton (310)-206-2012. Betsy will be calling her.
• Scanning of UC Berkeley materials is being funded by Yahoo and Microsoft, who has pretty much made decision about subject scope—American history, literature, biography; Also have contributed several hundred math books to OCA. Future areas—Western Americana, cookbooks, geography, travel. Toronto is scanning philosophy and religion
• Only scanning public domain monographs (no serials) that are currently housed at NRLF
• CDL creates the pick list from Melvyl; NRLF annotates the list as needed; Melvyl records are bib level; CDL runs them through the local catalog to get volume and barcode information for pick list.
• Facility issues: NRLF brought gigabit into the facility in order to handle 10 scanners; Bernie thinks megabit probably OK for just a couple of scanners; electricity and power needs are high—need lots of electrical circuits; it was an involved process for IA to set up the scanners—several weeks at least
• Started scanning in March 2006; as of 7/31/06 have scanned 13,000 volumes; after a slow start-up time, they are now scanning 1,000 books/week; NRLF hired 1FTE “library assistant” to retrieve materials and prepare them to be sent to the scanning center
• Once material is scanned, it’s sent to petaboxes at Internet Archive for processing; it was cheaper for them to install gigabit than it would have been to operate the petaboxes
• NRLF is hiring QA folks for stuff that is going into the CDL; for user access they will point to the IA copy (serving up PDFs)
• UC did an RFP; IA was lowest at 10 cents/page
• Prescanning work done by UC staff—examine text block for soundness, brittleness, looking for foldouts; this is a cursory check only; OCA eliminates some selections based on a closer review
• IA uses Z39.50 to connect to and take metadata from Melvyl catalog
• CDL not looking at large format scanning at this time
• Bernie says “OCA is not doing too much right now” when we asked how they were to work with. The folks at Internet Archive are very good and committed to the work
• IA has had trouble keeping their scanning center staffed; scanning is mind-numbing work—they look for people who can work full shifts in order to keep the production levels up but this is difficult and they have considerable turnover
• Based on what NRLF scanning center is doing with 10 scanners, we could probably do about 200 books/week with two scanners and one shift