Friday, March 24, 2006

CIL2006: Recreating the Civil War Provenance & Digitization

This session talked about two projects.

The first project was from Western Michigan Univ. to digitize eight diaries from Civil War veterans, who all had some relationship to the state of Michigan. The diaries came from different collections...and in digital format are creating a new collection. This new collection does have some additional information with it to help with context.

The group has previously done two small digitization projects for itself, but this one is more ambitious -- 1,100 pages from the diaries.

The team of seven people who worked on the project included someone who focused on color management.

Some of the work was done by students (scanning and transcribing), which helped with cost. Students are transcribing and encoding 3 - 5 pages/hour. The reviewer can do 8 pages/hour.

To digitize, they used a digital camera and copystand. One of the pieces of equipment I noticed on the list was color balancing light bulbs.

Everything will eventually end up in CONTENTdm. Of course, they are not as far along as they had hoped, but will be done by the end of the summer.

If they could do the project over, they would do more planning.

The second project was to digitize the History of Women Physicians being done at Drexell Univ. in Philadelphia. The is being funded by an IMLS grant. One cool thing about this project is the flash-based image viewer called Zoomify. Lots of overlap with the first presenter in some ways.


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