Book Review: Digital Imaging For Libraries and Archives

Anne Kenney and Stephen Chapman
Digital Imaging For Libraries and Archives
Preservation and Conservation, 214 Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-5301
ISBN 1 85604 207 3
Price: $75 + shipping
Review by Brian Kelly

You have been successful in your proposal and you've now got the funding to digitise the 1,000 volumes of serial literature. You now have to buy a scanner - or can you use the scanner provided by your local computing service? What type of scanner do you need? What resolution should you use for the digitisation? How much disk storage is needed? How much will the digitisation and disk storage cost? If these are questions that you have, then Cornell University's Library's Digital Imaging For Libraries and Archives is for you.

The handbook is the outcome of work began in 1990 when Cornell University and Xerox Corporation joined forces in a digitisation project. From June 1995 to March 1996 the Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation hosted a series of digital imaging workshops. Digital Imaging For Libraries and Archives is an expanded version of the workshop materials.

The authors' perspectives on digitisation are based on the following principles:

Know and love your documents

It is important to be able to identify key features in documents which are critical to the documents' meaning.

Create one scan to serve multiple uses

There are compelling preservation, access and economic reasons for creating a digital master in which all significant information contained in the source document is fully represented. The digital master can then be used to serve a variety of current and future needs.

Benchmark before you begin

Objectives should be clearly stated and the consequences of digital applications assessed before implementing a digitisation initiative.

Manage with the full digitisation chain in mind

Avoid being over concerned with, say, user needs, current technological capabilities, image quality or project costs alone, as this may compromise the ultimate utility of digital collections.

Select for success

Adopt a conservative approach to initiating digitisation projects. Avoid promising more than can be delivered or attempting more than is possible given current resources or current technologies.

The handbook provides a systematic procedure for digitisation projects. In the first two chapters 18 formulae are given that can be used to benchmark image quality, file sizes, storage costs, access times and on-screen presentation.

At a cost of $75 plus $8 shipping and handling the handbook would appear to be a bargain - especially if you are involved in the digitisation of the 1,000 volumes of serial literature mentioned at the beginning of this article. A case study in the handbook estimates $75,000 for the digitisation costs and $18,000 per year storage costs.

Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 14-Mar-1997