Digitization Committee - March 5, 2002 Minutes

Present: M.Waterson, J.Kovach, J.Spencer, N.Korpal, J.Hill, J.Hug, D.Haslett, D.Napoli

Tour of Local History:
Mary Waterson guided us through Local History and its resources with an emphasis on potential items for digitization. Items included atlases, indexes, books & pamphlets, gray box materials, and other materials such as the clippings file and maps.

Mission Statement revisited:
Mr. Napoli wanted to clarify our Mission Statement and align it with the current goals in our Technology Plan.

Implement on-going digitization program for special Local History & Genealogy clippings file, old local atlases and maps no longer protected by copyright, and family history collections with permission from authors by November 30, 2003, with the clippings file as the first priority; complete one third of the Clippings file digitization by December 31, 2004.

Meeting:
When our meeting resumed after the tour we all agreed that our most important job right now was to prioritize the items for digitization. Would we begin with the clippings file? Or something else?

Mary expressed some concerns over the accessibility of digitized materials. How many computer terminals would be available in Local History dedicated to access? Could these terminals support multiple access? Copyright issues would certainly effect whether or not we could have one or more users at a time.

It was suggested that we might consider asking a member of the South Bend Tribune to sit in on our meetings. They could see how important this project was to us and maybe we could come to some agreement over copyright issues.

Joyce talked about her recent phone call to UMI in regards to their current digitization project. The project leader will be attending a trade show in the next few weeks. He graciously agreed to look at some equipment and pass along vendor information that we might find useful.

Jane noted some problems we should consider when we think about scanning materials.
-What about sheets that have various articles turned different directions?
-What about items with no headings?
-What about different subjects on the same page?

It was felt that we would not try to answer those issues today, but instead address them as they come. The equipment we purchase and how it works may solve some of these issues.

It was noted that we would need really good printers for patron use when the project is completed. We will experiment with different resolutions to assure print quality.

We seemed to reach a consensus by meetings end that we would scan items as an image rather than text.

We decided to form two sub-committees to tackle a couple of issues. One committee (Mary, Jane, John) will work on taxonomy and recommend where to get subject headings and what subject headings should be changed/updated. The equipment committee (Joyce, Dave, Mr. Napoli) will research various types of equipment and vendors.

Our next meeting will be on April 2, 2002 at 2pm in the Presentation Room (which has been reserved).

Submitted by Julie Hill
March 8, 2002