Digitization: Grassroots Collaboration, Partnerships and High-Fidelity Digital Objects
Thursday October 29, 2020
From 2:15pm to 2:45pm
This session will describe the technologies and the partnerships that make these projects possible, including the University of Windsor, the University of Alberta for digitizing and transcribing materials from the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, and an initiative with Library and Archives Canada and other memory organizations to save and preserve the physical collections of newspapers in a time of mass closures.
Document
OurDigitalWorld (ODW) is the culmination of nearly three decades of community-based collaborations and partnerships in cultural heritage. ODW strives to capture content where it lives and to empower digitization projects as much as possible to support discovery and reuse. Many of ODW's partners are small historical societies and other modestly funded organizations, representing both volunteers and dedicated staff, with unmatched local expertise on historically significant assets within their communities.
Examples include crowd-sourcing the transcription of manuscripts, leveraging promising technical trends in text recognition software, and exploring low-cost options for digitizing material from microform (microfilm and microfiche). In each of these areas, ODW adopts best practices for digital object formats and promotes appropriate standards for maximum long-term preservation and reuse of digital content. ODW has also worked on hardware prototypes in an effort to reduce the costs of digitizing materials from analogue sources, particularly in regard to newspapers on microfilm, an area where ODW has established a substantial track record. In many cases, this digitization work has meant revisiting existing digital projects and collections, for example, using advances in OCR to reprocess page images for better results.
This session will describe the technologies and the partnerships that make these projects possible, including the University of Windsor, the University of Alberta for digitizing and transcribing materials from the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, and an initiative with Library and Archives Canada and other memory organizations to save and preserve the physical collections of newspapers in a time of mass closures.
