British Periodicals: 1660-1800

Instead of blogging about an already live digitization initiative, I thought that I'd discuss a potential digitization initiative that I recently learned about. Last week at the Ransom Center, a scholar discussed his work on the creation of a searchable database that cataloged hundreds of periodicals from the 18th century. The goal of the database is to provide scholars with content and bibliographic information and currently does not provide digital versions of the periodicals.


During the lecture, one of the other scholars asked whether the database would ever provide links to digital images of the periodicals. This provoked a discussion of the difficulties of digitizing this material. The main issue discussed was cost. In conjunction with Rutgers, the scholar had proposed a digitzation plan and did a pilot test of how much cost and time would be required to do the work. They attempted to use OCR technology to capture the content of the articles, but because of the quality of the objects, the OCR process was rejected due to the amount of errors produced. Next, they shipped out some of the periodicals to be keyed in overseas. This also produced accuracy problems because the outsourcing company did a poor job keying in odd or archaic characters, again raising concerns about accuracy.

What they decided was that at this time, it would be too costly and time consuming to create accurate surrogates. He also argued that most scholars interested in this material would probably want to see the object itself and would not prefer a surrogate. I though this was an interesting argument, but there was no factual information provided to back of this claim. The scholar had no user studies or data to defend this assumption.

When the digital portion of the project fell through, so did a lot of the funding for the project. This lack of funding has prevented from the database from becomming live at all. Therefore, all of the information that has been cataloged and entered into this database is not serving its function at all, because no one can access it.

This lecture was interesting to me because it highlighted the complications of starting a digital initiative project without much insight into the process and without much knowledge of user needs. It put into perspective the necessity of proper planning and project management.