The Digital Dungeon

Project planning and project management can be useful for many things besides digital projects, however they are particularly useful for digital projects because digital projects tend to have many different components. You have to worry about people, funding, schedules, and technology. Any one of those things by themselves would be difficult to manage without a plan of attack. Dealing with all of them at once requires a lot of attention and planning. Project planning and project management can be summed up in 5 steps. These should be done in order. This is a brief overview of the project process, and by no means does it cover the whole topic. If you are interested in reading more about project management, I highly suggest The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Project Management Course by Helen S. Cooke and Karen Tate (ISBN 0-07-143897-1). 1) Context Once you have been assigned a digital project, develop your context. Why is the project important? Who wants it done? Who is involved and why? ...

Libraries have to take many things into consideration when considering starting a new digitization project. Equipment for mass digitization is usually specialized and very expensive. Only a few companies make the equipment, allowing them a strong control over the overall market. This causes prices to be inflated. For book scanners a library could pay anywhere from $40,000 to $300,000 for just one piece of equipment. Some book scanners cut the book out of the binding before scanning the pages individually. Keeping an expensive piece of equipment working past the purchase date usually means the library also has to pay a yearly maintenance or warrantee subscription, which adds to the overall price of the equipment. A good guess is 10-15% of the purchase price every year to keep the equipment running. For a $300,000 machine that comes to $30,000-$45,000 a year for as long as the machine is being used. In addition to the price of the equipment, the library must pay for server storage...

The Basics: Large scale Digital Project Management Part 1 I went through a class last year about digital project management, and as much as I was impressed at the technical part of the class, and the part of the class where we designed a website to put the digital stuff up, I was surprised to find out that the class had very little to do with large scale project (items that were over 100 items). It also completely ignored book digitization. This is odd, because 90% of my job is large scale digitization book efforts. There are a few things that you need to consider when doing a large scale digitization effort (especially if it’s books). What is the quantity of items to be digitized? A collection of 200 items is going to be treated differently than a collection of 14,000 items. How much variety is there in the group of items? Are they all books? All pictures? Are they mixed documents? Are they bound? If you find that the group has many subgroups, go ahead and divide them out and make eac...

This year, a colleague and I gave a presentation on how the digital lab at Texas Tech University ramped up its digitization efforts. It's called The Digital Assembly Line , and it lives at the Texas Digital Library repository . I happen to stumble upon it while doing a Google search.

File size is important when you are trying to make an image available on-line because it has to be good quality enough that it’s useful, but small enough that it can be loaded into a browser without having the patron wait. Also, if you want to archive the images, then you want a high quality archival image without being too hefty on memory. There are a few things that affect file size: The type of file affects file size. See the post about file types . Whether you are saving in full color, grayscale, or black and white also affects it. Typically, full color images are going to be large files. Grayscale is slightly smaller, but still much greater than black and white. However, you have some options when saving in full color or grayscale. 8 Bit or 24 bit Color/Grayscale You can save a color or grayscale image as either 8 bit or 24 bit color or grayscale. 8-bit 8 bit means that there are 8 bits that describe each pixel. This means that you have 256 different combination of bits to s...

DPI (Dots Per Inch) in digital imaging means how many pixels per square inch make up the image. For example, if I scan a 1 inch by 1 inch piece of paper in 300 DPI, then there are 300 pixels in the image that I scanned. If I looked at the digital image and realized that it did not show enough detail of the image, then I would scan it at 600 DPI. Now, the digital image has 600 pixels that represent the image. You can keep going up and up, but there reaches a point where adding more pixels does not gain you any more detail. Why? Because at some point you start picking up detail about the paper (or medium) that the items is on. You start to see the fibers in a piece of paper, or the dimples on it’s surface. Once you start picking up that level of detail, you are actually creating more “noise” in the image than is necessary and you need to back off on the DPI. Most printed text, for example, is printed in 80-90 DPI on a page. However, this does not mean you can scan the image at ...

At work we are looking at the Atiz Bookdrive . The two Atiz products (The Bookdrive DIY and the Book snap) end up being very affordable options for digitization. An organization, depending on what options they want, can get a setup for anywhere from $3000-$10,000. I haven't seen this equipment in person, but once I do, I'll be sure to post about it.