Posts tagged with Digitization in Blog Library Tech Talk

In 2020, the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship in Atlanta, Georgia reached out to the University of Michigan to contribute to the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL). They asked the Bentley Historical Library, the U-M Library, and the William L. Clements Library to contribute titles in our collections that would expand their digital collection. This post looks at the range of titles contributed, discusses the equipment used to digitize the titles, and analyses the ways that SSDL and U-M Library align and vary in their digitization efforts.

This article reviews how 9,000+ frames of photographic negatives from the Harry A. Franck collection are being digitally preserved.

DCU has a new, A1-sized V-cradle scanner for digitizing tightly bound books. This post examines the need, research, and choice of scanner we purchased.

HathiTrust started out with only content digitized by Google, but a goal from early on was to support digitized book material from a variety of sources. One early effort provided a toolkit to partners for preparing content, but which turned out to require more technical effort than was reasonable. We rethought our approach and simplified the requirements for partners while maintaining the same high quality standards for HathiTrust.

Here at the U-M Library, we’re committed to identifying opportunities for engagement between Library staff and students. But identifying these opportunities can be difficult for our Library’s IT unit since we’re not involved with students as part of our day-to-day work. How do we as tech professionals engage with the student community?

It’s possible we should have written this blog post years ago, when we first created our workflow for how we shepherd digitization projects through our Digital Library. Well, we were busy creating it, that’s our excuse. Three years later, we’re on our third iteration.

The Digital Conversion Unit (DCU) recently acquired a new setup that will allow for the digital capture of 3D objects, realia, and ephemera. The new equipment will create museum quality photos of 3D objects to be included in the Library's digital collections.

The University of Michigan Library has received a CLIR grant to provide specialized access to Islamic manuscripts. Users of the site will be able to contribute to the description/cataloging of each item. We are digitizing 1250 manuscripts as part of this project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the following summary of the process.