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Tag Archives: digitization
History of immigration: Map of US immigrant populations in 1903
The Slate Vault today highlighted a “data-packed” map of American immigration in 1903 from the annual report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration. The Vault always posts interesting and beautiful maps, images etc. They also linked to anew-to-me site called Handsome Atlas that has some beautiful scans and visualizations of historic US atlases. GO and check […]
Canada set to digitize documents, but limit access
The Canadian government's Library and Archives Canada (LAC) announced more details of its digitization project. In a "digitization partnership" with Canadiana.org, a not-for-profit charitable organization, there will be a large scale digitization project that will involve about 60 million images from numerous collections, including the indexing and description of millions of personal, administrative and government documents, as well as land grants, war diaries and photographs and the transcription of millions of handwritten pages. This is a "10-year agreement."
- Library and Archives Canada and Canadiana.org partner on digitization, online publication of millions of images from archival microfilm collection. Library and Archives Canada (2013-08-29).
Document of the day. Or why a paper document may be better than a digitized version
I just received an old (historic NOT legacy) Department of Commerce publication off of the needs and offers list called "Commercial handbook of China" by Julean Arnold, commercial attaché (WorldCat record). It's actually a 1975 reprint of a 1919 publication. It's chock full of statistics relating to provinces, cities, and consular districts -- agriculture, minerals and mining, populations, exports and imports, revenues, transportation, ports and shipping facilities etc. In short, this is a gold mine of historic information and statistics from the Republic of China (pre-Communist China). The document was digitized and is available in HathiTrust as well as the Internet Archive (see book reader below). However, in comparing the digitized version with the paper version in hand, I came upon several issues:
- there are 3 foldout maps that were not digitized. These maps are critical information on railway lines and treaty ports in China. The bibliographic record has a physical description including "2 v. fronts., plates, fold. map, tables, diagrs., fold. charts" but no content note mentioning that the maps were not digitized.
- As I mentioned, the document is chock full of statistical tables. Have you ever tried copying and pasting tabular data from a PDF? It's even worse when the tables are displayed in landscape rather than portrait. I've verified that the OCR fails on those pages.
- Lots of readability/usability issues: The table of contents is partially obscured in one copy and the tables are often blurred or faint. also, HT is using a process of OCR now where you can search but not copy or paste.
- Lastly, I find it ... uh... interesting that this book says here "Copyright: Public Domain, Google-digitized." But, if you want to download the whole book, you have to be an HT partner.
Canada set to privatize public documents, papers, and data for 10 years
We have seen this happen before in the U.S. (See, for example: The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent and GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West) and Canada (Help save the Library & Archives Canada), but this seems like a particularly bad, unjustifiable example of privatization of public information.
- Library and Archives Canada private deal would take millions of documents out of public domain, By Chris Cobb, OTTAWA CITIZEN (June 12, 2013). Library and Archives Canada has entered a hush-hush deal with a private high-tech consortium that would hand over exclusive rights to publicly owned books and artifacts for 10 years. ...LAC is partnering with Canadiana.org in what is being billed as The Heritage Project -- digitizing 40 million images from more than 800 collections of publicly-held LAC material, much bought by Library and Archives over the years with taxpayers' money. ...Under the agreement, digital images will begin rolling back into the free public domain -- known as "open access" -- as the 10-year exclusive rights expire.
Digital Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard
"The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard." James A. Jacobs, University of California San Diego and James R. Jacobs, Stanford University. D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2013, Volume 19, Number 3/4. Also available in the Stanford Digital Repository and the University of California Escholarship Repository. Abstract Continue reading
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