I'm the current Chair of this interest group, and I thought readers might be interested in hearing about our upcoming meeting.
ASCLA-ICAN Collaborative Digitization Interest Group at ALA Annual
Saturday, January 21, 2012 | 4-5:30 in Dallas Convention Center, D161
Join us for conversations about new and ongoing issues and opportunities related to collaborative digitization initiatives across a diverse array of consortia, libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions. This meeting is open to all and will feature a main presentation (see below) and brief project updates from attendees.
Please contact Jason Kucsma ([email protected]) if you would like to be added to the project update agenda or if you would like to volunteer to chair this group for the upcoming year.
Validating Quality in Large-Scale Digitization
Jackie Bronicki, MLIS | University of Michigan
The large‐scale digitization of books and serials is generating extraordinary collections of intellectual content that are transforming teaching and scholarship at all levels of the educational enterprise. Significant questions have been raised, however, regarding the quality and fitness for use of digital surrogates produced by third‐party vendors. For digital repositories and their communities of users to trust that deposited objects have the capacity to meet the uses envisioned for them, repositories must validate the quality and fitness for use of the objects they preserve. The presentation showcases the initial findings from a review of a statistically valid sample of digitized volumes that reside in the HathiTrust Digital Library and are in the public domain. The presentation summarizes the investigative methods, presents data on the distribution of perceived error in the sampled volumes, and presents preliminary findings on the correlation of these errors with some of the most important bibliographic and physical characteristics of the source books. The presentation concludes with speculation on what the findings suggest for the use of digitized volumes for preservation, access, and use. The research is supported by generous grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is a collaboration between the University of Michigan’s School of Information, the libraries of the universities of Michigan and Minnesota, and HathiTrust. The project is at mid-point in its two year investigation of image quality and the impact of large scale digitization on use and usability.
About Jackie Bronicki
Jackie Bronicki is the project coordinating librarian for a grant, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, focusing on validating quality in large-scale digitization. Jackie is based out of Technical Services at the University of Michigan Library and works under the direct guidance of the Professor Paul Conway, Principal Investigator for the grant, from the School of Information at University of Michigan. She manages many aspects of the day to day operations of the research project with a focus on data collection to determine frequency and severity of error in digitization. She graduated from Rice University in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts in Human Physiology, with an area interest in Biology and Biochemistry. In 2005, she completed her MLIS at Wayne State University with a specialization in medical librarianship. Before joining the project team at University of Michigan, she was a project coordinator for a large international dialysis study focused on collecting both qualitative and quantitative data from over 400 facilities in 13 countries.