DecapodLatest Work and Release
Project GoalsScholarly content needs to be online, and for much mass produced content, that migration has happened. Unfortunately, the online presence of scholarly content is much more sporadic for long tail material such as small journals, original source materials in the humanities and social sciences, non-journal periodicals, and more. A large barrier to this content being available is the cost and complexity of setting up a digitization project for small and scattered collections coupled with a lack of revenue opportunities to recoup those costs. Collections with limited audiences and hence limited revenue opportunities are nonetheless often of considerable scholarly importance within their domains. The expense and difficulty of digitization presents a significant obstacle to making paper archives available online.To meet this need we are building Decapod. Decapod will be an inexpensive attaché case sized hardware/software solution that can be readily procured and assembled and taken into the stacks or out into the field by local staff or volunteers to quickly and unobtrusively capture the material and deliver it in usable format. It will be open-source, easy to use, and will provide an out-of-the box method of digitizing small to medium archives of scholarly material. Decapod will remove the barriers to digitization now encountered by archives of documentary material: cost of equipment, cost of labour, lack of digitization expertise, lack of suitable distribution formats, and lack of acceptable remediation workflows. Decapod will address them all to produce a paper-to-digital document solution that is highly effective, highly automated, and low operator interaction (apart from page turning). The solution will address these problem areas:
Project Partners
Project FundingThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 140 East 62nd Street New York, NY 10065 Tel: (212) 838-8400 Fax: (212) 888-4172 |