Digital Text and Libraries

Michael Popham

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Ranganathan’s laws of library science

1. Books are for use

2. Every reader his book

3. Every book its reader

4. Save the time of the reader

5. A library is a growing organism

(Ranganathan, 1931)

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Libraries and digital texts

…as purchasers of digital texts– from publishers, aggregator services

…as producers of digital texts– digitized from analogue originals, analogue surrogates

…as custodians of digital texts– purchased and licensed material– institutional repositories, digital assets created in-

house – acquired e-MSS and personal digital collections

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Libraries and digital texts – the challenges

…as purchasers of digital texts– we have to work with what we’re sold/what’s available

…as producers of digital texts– we have to work with what we’ve got

…as custodians of digital texts– we have to work with what we’re given

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Thomas Bodley’s Vision

Bodleian founded 1602 Universal library Bodley’s “Republic of Letters” Legal deposit privilege since 1610 60% of Bodleian readers not members of Oxford

University

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Bodleian Library

400 staff Budget of £14m (€20.5m) Stock 8 million items 45,000 registered users 120 Miles (192km) of shelving 123,000 monograph items and 194,000 serial

items added each year

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Oxford University Library Services

> 660 staff (600 fte) 40 libraries, including the Bodleian Budget > £25m (€37m) Total bookstock:11 million items 156 miles (250km) of shelving, including

repository space

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

The “Digital Library” at Oxford

1960s Machine-readable texts for scholarly purposes1976 Oxford Text Archive founded1980s Networked databases and CD-ROMs1990s Libraries on the web, e-journals etc.2001 Oxford Digital Library (ODL)2005 ELISO (Electronic Library

& Information Service)Google/Oxford partnership

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

An affecting and sublime! scene, or, : The great captain going to head his armies

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Oxford-Google Project: what to digitize?

Direct discussions with Google since 2003 Win/win situation for both parties Extensive collection of out-of-copyright (and

mostly out-of-print) material identified – Oxford differs from other partners in this aspect of our

agreement– Decision made to begin with the 19th century material– Looking at approximately 1+ million items

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Overview of workflow

Selection

Suitable for digitization?

Reshelve

Fast-track

Slow-trackDigitize

Generate deliverables

Store outputs

Update OULS OPAC

QAY

Y

N

N

Update Google.print index

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Outputs and outcomes

Large raw colour images from digitization process Per volume, OULS receives:

– JPEG2000 (probably), and TIFFs– Uncorrected OCR

Audit of production process There are quality control processes at Google & Oxford Deliverable images (to be hosted by Google in the first

instance) linked to OPAC records Ongoing software/hardware developments to improve the

process

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Challenges that lie ahead…

Building the local infrastructure to manage and deliver the Oxford Digital Copy of the data

Investigating ways to exploit the data, e.g.:– Correcting OCR files, adding additional markup– (Re-)structuring the data – moving beyond a simple search and

page-turning presentation– Completing/extending volumes and collections– Automatic collation, authorship attribution, stylistic analysis.

….and many, many more(?!) Raising the barrier of what is possible, and end-users’

expectations about what we can deliver

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Feel the Fear….

©opyright and IPR Threat to (Scholarly) e-Publishers Proliferating plagiarism Encouraging poor research Scope creep, scalability, data deluge Preservation and access

DOI Meeting, Oxford, June 2006

Useful links

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/google/ http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html