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Re: Accessing digitized microfilm



Barbara Aikens wrote:
> Has anyone out there digitized microfilm and made it accessible/linked to a finding aid (either EAD or HTML)?  I'm pondering how to effectively provide some kind of access to the .tif files resulting from digitizing the microfilm frames, without having to close and open each file, but rather scroll through (on a server, not CD). The collection is large and filmed on 167 reels of film.

Please forgive me if this isn't directly addressing the issue you raise,
but you may want to consider the generation of GIF images dynamically
from the TIFF ones.

A great explanation of this approach is at:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may97/michigan/05pricewilkin.html

This would allow you to provide browser access to the files without
having to manually copy and store various versions of the same files.
There's some processing overhead on the server when the dynamic
conversion happens, but it could be worth it in many cases.  And, if
what you mean by "scroll through" the files is viewing thumbnails of
them, dynamic conversion can also deal with this without having to
manually create thumbnails for everything.  Of course, thumbnails won't
always be the best approach for navigational purposes, since the shrunk
down versions of a lot of text pages don't really give the use much to
go by.  Assuming there's no digital text derived from the images through
transcription or OCR, it may be best to use some sort of page turner
interface, like that used with several of the American Memory
collections
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/award/docs/page-turning.html

Of course, if you have enough item-level control within the finding aid
itself (linking from a finding aid description to the digital object
itself), then jumping to specific images of interest is probably
feasible through it.  But if the finding aid describes materials at a
much higher level, like series, providing a page-turner interface within
all the pages in that series could be an option.

Assuming you'll be keeping the images for a while, preservation efforts
can also be facilitated by working from the relatively stable TIFF
format and only converting that one master if/when that becomes
necessary, rather than needing to periodically convert multiple versions
of the same images.

> Has anyone played around with this?  Did you convert to .pdf first? Are there any web sites with access to entire digitized microfilmed collections? Any suggestions?

I'm sure opinions on this will vary widely, but unless printer control
is of utmost importance to you, I wouldn't recommend using PDF.  Master
copies should be in TIFF and web versions should be in GIF or JPEG (and
soon possibly SVG or JPEG2000).  The need for an Adobe plugin can create
a lot of usability and accessibility headaches that are usually
unnecessary, in my opinion.

=======================================================
Cal Lee
Electronic Records Project Archivist
Kansas State Historical Society
Phone: 785-272-8681, ext. 280         Fax: 785-272-8682
http://da.state.ks.us/itab/erc/
http://www.kshs.org/archives/recmgt.htm
                  "Obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
                                           - Ted Nelson

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