Whenever Kenning Arlitsch shows off the Marriott Library’s digital collection, people are amazed by the technology. The problem is that not enough of them take advantage of it.
The collection is a database of online multimedia files produced from the library’s archive of rare manuscripts, historical maps, famous diaries and other documents it wants to share with a wider audience.
“You can’t force people to come [to the library],” said Arlitsch, the head of digital technology. “But if you post them onto the Web, you can get more exposure.”
Although the digital collection has been around for several years, Arlitsch said, few departments on campus have requested digitization of their content, a service the library provides for a fee.
“It’s an idea that is being resisted?because it’s new,” Arlitsch said.
To give the technology a boost, Arlitsch will present the idea of a statewide digital collection to the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC), a council of library directors from Utah universities.
Using uniform standards in file format and similar user interfaces would make documents more accessible, Arlitsch said. The system would also include metadata, information describing the multimedia files, so users can search for content by fields such as author, creation date, description and place of origin.
In the scenario envisioned by Arlitsch, each of the major universities in the state would manage a regional server, hosting digital collections for various organizations. A central “aggregating server” in the state would periodically collect the metadata from the regional servers so a user can search all collections in the state with a single query.
Buying the hardware for such a system is relatively cheap compared to the administrative costs, such as making sure the servers are online continuously. By having universities manage the servers, these costs can be minimized.
“Anyone can buy a flatbed scanner and start digitizing images,” Arlitsch said, “but to manage them, you need [a digital collection server].”
Arlitsch came to the U in ’94 after finishing his master of library and information studies degree. After seeing the library’s unique collections, he immediately saw the need for digitization. Arlitsch easily persuaded the library to fund a digitization center, which he still manages.
“The library was very supportive,” Arlitsch said. “They were just waiting for someone to step up to do this.”
To digitize the documents, many of which are fragile, Arlitsch photographs them in a studio using a $25,000 Leica digital camera capable of 5,000 x 5,000-pixel images. Most of them are compressed using JPEG, a standard used on the Web. Some documents, such as maps, need to allow users to zoom in, so they are compressed using a new tool called MrSid (pronounced Mister Sid).
The manual process of scanning is followed by the equally labor-intensive task of entering metadata for each file. The metadata can include the entire text of the document. For manuscripts and some older books, the center’s staff have to transcribe the entire content because OCR (optical character recognition) software cannot convert images of these documents to electronic text. The need for manpower is another motivation for Arlitsch’s request for additional funding.
In a presentation at the School of Medicine last week, the technology impressed the audience. Arlitsch thinks digitization has application at the school. He suggested posting anatomy atlases so students can access them anytime anywhere. After the presentation, he looked ahead to his presentation to the UALC.
“So far, the response has been very positive,” Arlitsch said. “I’m pretty confident people will go for this.”