Managing the Digitization of Large Press Archives

Abstract

Managing the digitization of press material is quite a challenge; not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of text and material quality, designing the workflow system which organizes the operations, and handling the metadata. This challenge has been the focus of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s digitization work during the past year in the course of its partnership with the Center for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ). Having more than 800,000 pages of press articles to be digitally preserved and publicly accessed, triggered an inevitable need to design a workflow that can manage such a massive collection and handle its attributes proficiently. The deployment of this endeavor required simultaneous intervention of four main aspects; data analysis of the collection, developing a digitization workflow for the collection at hand, implementing and installing the necessary software tools for metadata entry, and finally, publishing the digital archive online for researchers and public access.

The presentation will demonstrate the workflow system which is being implemented to manage this massive press collection, which has yielded to date more than 400,000 pages. It will shed some light on the BA’s Digital Assets Factory (DAF), which is the nucleus upon which the digitization process of CEDEJ collection has been built. Additionally, the presentation will discuss the tools implemented for ingesting data into the digitization process starting form indexing until the creation of batches that are ingested into the system. The outflow will also be discussed in terms of organizing and grouping multipart press clips, in addition to the reviewing, validation and correction of the output. Light will also be shed on the challenges encountered to associate the accessible online archive with a powerful search engine supporting multidimensional search while maintaining a user-friendly navigation experience.