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HOUSE OF LORDS PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS 1800-1910
Auto Docs are extremely privileged to be digitising over 100 years of UK parliament history in conjunction with ProQuest, The House of Lords and The National Library of Scotland. Auto Docs current flagship project is the Digitisation of House of Lords parliamentary papers from 1800 – 1910. This consists of the digitisation of approx. 4 million images (circa. 5,000 volumes over a 3 year period). The project commenced in April 2015 in Auto Docs Glasgow facility, digitising images of House of Lords parliamentary papers provided by The National Library of Scotland. In March 2016 further scanning began in Auto Docs London facility from volumes supplied by House of Lords, London. Auto Docs provide a weekly collection and return service in London to/and from House of Lords, London and similarly in Scotland also a weekly service between The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh & Auto Docs Glasgow facility. Volumes in both locations are collected by Auto Docs own highly trained staff using Auto Docs own vehicles. All volumes are carefully handled, scanned & tracked through the Auto Docs production process, which records details from pick up, booking in to Auto Docs system, scanning, QC, Rescan if applicable, packing & return. Reports are produced daily recording all activity with notes on each volume. In the first 12 months of the project Auto Docs delivered 1.7 million images, with a final rescan rate of less than 0.1%. This is project of real UK historic significance in digitising over 100 years of UK legal history and making the content available to academics and researchers world wide from ProQuest
MET OFFICE
Auto Docs have recently digitised Met office volumised recordings from weather stations throughout the UK originally captured manually from late 1800’s to 2000. The volumes are large in size (A2 page) with data all hand written. Data recorded in the volumes showed Amount of rainfall, No. hours sunshine, air pressure etc all recorded manually every day in every weather station in the UK from the late 1800’s. The Scottish volumes of weather data were scanned in our Glasgow office and England/ Wales volumes scanned in Auto Docs London office. Additional Marine logs have also been digitised. After scanning on our i2s copi book scanners, all images have been imported into Auto Docs data capture system and all data captured and verified from image by the Auto Docs keying team based in Glasgow. The data capture exercise amounted to in excess of 10 million keystrokes captured over 6 months in Auto Docs Glasgow office with a 99.99% accuracy level produced.
ROYAL HOLLOWAY UNIVERSITY THESES
Auto Docs were proud to be involved in the Digitisation of Theses from Royal Holloway University, London. This consisted of 2,000 bound Theses (approx. 600k images) single sided with various types and sizes of fold outs within a 6 month period to completion. Scanned to grayscale and bi-tonal image collections and includes creation of various additional metadata file sets including extracted Abstract text, author, year, and title information, compiled into a master listing and XML output file, per volume.
MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY
BUSINESS CONTEXT
The Mary Evans Picture Library located in Blackheath, London, began life in 1964, with a philosophy that has remained unchanged for over 40 years: to make available and accessible images created over the centuries that were originally published in books, on posters, in advertisements, or as prints. Included in their collection are original copies of many popular illustrated periodicals whose content are of great value to researchers worldwide as they provide a window into society's past. But accessing their content meant either a visit to the Mary Evans library in person, or piecemeal requests for copies.
ProQuest, head-quartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is in the business of providing content access solutions for researchers and libraries globally. In 2014 ProQuest obtained the digital rights to a portfolio of five historic periodicals held at the Mary Evans from the copyright holder, Illustrated London News Ltd. The portfolio consisted of Tatler, The Sphere, The Graphic, The Sketch, and Bystander, all periodicals published between 1869 and 1990. In March 2014 ProQuest issued an RFP for a service provider to capture the entire content of the collection for on-line publication. The challenge for the bidders was that scanning was required to be undertaken on site, but the space available within the library for setting up a capture operation was extremely limited. A further challenge was the delivery dates required by ProQuest – they wanted to launch the collection on-line in September 2014 with at least a partially complete catalogue. Including magazine covers, advertising pages, picture pages as well as printed text, the periodical collection was estimated at over 900,000 separate pages.
SOLUTION
Automated Document Services Ltd. (Auto Docs) – is a document capture services agency based in Glasgow, Scotland. Auto Doc’s core team have over fourteen years experience specialising in the digitisation of books. Auto Docs is unique in Scotland as being the only agency certified to ISO 27001 information security standards, as well as having ISO9001 quality management accreditation.
When the ProQuest RFP was issued in March 2014, Auto Docs was exceptionally well-placed to make a strong bid as they had available both the scanners and the skilled operators required for the Mary Evans project. Key to their capture capability was their CopiBook Cobalt book scanners from i2S DigiBook. Auto Docs is supported by Spigraph Network, exclusive distribution partner for i2S in the UK. ADS chose the CopiBook Cobalt as it is the leading A2 book scanner available in the market and is well-known for its superior image quality and high productivity. ADS’s experienced operators appreciated its easy-to-operate ergonomic design and versatility with numerous automatic and intuitive capture modes capable of scanning books, manuals, newspapers, photos and other document types..
The primary challenge for Auto Docs was balancing ProQuest's project time-line with the extremely limited on-site space & time available for the capture operation. The floor space available to host the digitization operation was approximately 4m by 2m and, because of this, Auto Docs would be limited to installing only two capture workstations. Would this be enough to capture the estimated 900,000 periodical pages in the time available?
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