Digital Collections Inventory Report
By Patricia A. McClungFebruary 1996
Notes
1. See Appendix I for an earlier survey conducted by an American Library Association Committee.
2. There are further distinctions that can be made depending on whether the scanning needs to accommodate illustrations imbedded in the text.
3. At the risk of further complicating these distinctions, often times the full-text conversion projects involve a first step which creates a digital page image to use for either keyboarding or OCR (the digital images produced in the process may or may not be retained).
4. These encoding projects also involve prior scanning, keyboarding and/or OCR steps as well.
5. From private correspondence with Anne R. Kenney, November 1995.
6. Anne R. Kenney “Conversion of Traditional Source Materials into Digital Form,” an unpublished paper sponsored by the private DISCUSSIONSelectronic mailing list of the Getty Art History Information Program, June 1995, p. 2 and telephone conversation with John Price-Wilkin of the University of Michigan on July 28, 1995.
7. The University of Arizona Clearinghouse of Image Databases represents a good start. The access by institution, cross-indexed by media, is very useful. Keyword searching is also supported. Unfortunately, the resource “dies” in the middle when you get to the actual citation–a typed form that is usually only partly filled out with the requisite information The creator of the Clearinghouse, Stuart Glogoff, plans in due course (time and budgets permitting) to add “hot links” to the home page of each institution sponsoring a project. That would lead the searcher to the latest information, and perhaps even the digitized materials themselves- To fulfill its potential, the Clearinghouse needs paid staff to verify entries, seek out new ones, and generally maintain the information Additional information on this very important resource is included in Appendix II.
8. As for documentary editing projects (with online products)–such as many of the Presidential Papers–a separate inventory might be warranted. The methodology of this study did not pick them up readily, and a survey would need to be targeted more specifically to capture information about these important resources.
10. See also Appendix III, which includes an informal, unpublished survey of Law related digital projects conducted in the spring of 1995 by Robin Mills (Emory University Law Library), Kathie Price (NYU Law Library) and Liz Kelly (University of Pennsylvania Law Library). It also includes list of the members of the Consortium for Optical Imaging in Law Libraries.
11.A publication (RLG Digital Access Project Proceedings, edited by Patricia A. McClung, 1995) reporting on this project is available from RLG by contacting the RLIN Information Center at bl.ric@rlg.stanford or 1-800/537-7546.
12. Excerpted from online repont, by Kathleen Cohen, entitled “Lessons Learned from Project Delta,” received from the author by electronic mail on December 1, 1995.
13.”Turning an Info-Glut into a Library,” Science (vol. 266, October 7, 1994), p. 20.
