Tuesday, June 07, 2005

More info from the SLA conference

Yesterday morning I attended a breakfast meeting by the Biomedical and Life Science Division on digitization. Four speakers talked about three projects, with the most interesting being the Lyman Digitization Project at McGill University. They are digitizing books and other documents from this entomological collections so that the researchers have access to materials that should be (or are) stored in special collections. The presenter noted that because of the need to do transcriptions (done by students), scanning, OCR and mark-up of the pages that the cost per page was approx. $20 (Canadian).

Yesterday got a chance to also spend time talking to the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), OCLC and Backstage Library Works. I asked the CCC if they every helped digitization projects clear the copyright on items like photographs (e.g., not books/journal stuff) and they said "no." Seems like that would be a useful services for them to provide.

I took a look at Grokker, which is federated search software. Very, very cool.

I've got a few more vendors to talk to today....

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