Options for digital delivery Record Society Conference, April 19 th 2007 Bruce Tate Project Manager British History Online

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate2 The current situation  Widening audience  Maximising usage  Need for revenue generation  Current technology evolving  New emerging technology  Changing / rising user expectations

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate3 Making sense of the situation  Consider all 3 elements and their inter-relationships  Constantly updated intellectual model Users Technology Organisation

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate4 Option 1/3 – simple HTML  The ‘webmaster’ phase  Could be born digital, or converted from typescript version used for print  Simple transcription can be done by non- technical volunteers  Little control over the data, no possibility for adding extra semantic meanings

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate5 Option 2/3 – double keying into XML  Requires scanned page images  Text is transcribed by two operators separately who also add bespoke XML tags at the same time  Third operator runs comparison checks, correcting any errors  Highly accurate (99.9% and above) – minimum benchmark for academic use  More expensive - £2 to £4 per page  Examples: –British History Online –Old Bailey Online

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate6 Option 3/3 – page image + OCR  Scanned page image is ‘read’ by Optical Character Recognition software, and a text transcript produced  Either, –output text for conversion to HTML, or –Save as image with ‘hidden’ text transcription to enable searching  Very fast, can be trained to learn from mistakes - processing can be refined many times  Requires proof reading and error checking; non-standard layouts, older typefaces (esp. oblique), and poor quality originals  Adobe Capture - £350, Omnipage Pro - £320, Abbyy Finereader £60

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate7 Comparing the options TimeCostQuality Option 1: HTML HighLowHigh Option 2: Double key MediumHighHigh Option 3: OCR Low- Medium

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate8 Some possible trends  More ‘co-operative’ content creation  More and more silver surfers  Growth of print on demand  ‘Mature’ Web 2.0: –Blog with useful information –Wiki with specialised terminology –Overlay Google Maps with data sets / photos

April 19th 2007Bruce Tate9 Round-up  Period of slow and intense change  Distinctions breaking down between: –User and creator –Society and contract publisher –Society and bookseller  Keep thinking about your users, organisation and technology plus the relationships between them.