SLA2008: A Digital Microfilm Road Map

On Monday, June 16, there was a session at the SLA Annual Conference entitled "A Digital Microfilm Road Map" sponsored by the News Division. Each of the speakers talked about their experience with digitizing newspaper microfilm. Presentations will be available on the News Division web site. Here are some quick notes from the session:

• Microfilm equals preservation. Digitization equals access as well as the ability to create new products.
• When considering a project, check to see what similar organizations have done.
• Survey your vendors and compare their answers.
• the more human involvement in the project, the higher the cost. For example, if you want your OCR to be 100% accurate, that will require people to review the OCR and the cost of the project will increase.
• Think about the return on investment (ROI) for your project.
• Newspaper digitization is still problematic, according to the presenter from the California newspaper Project. Standards still have not been developed, but should be developed soon.
• Preserving the microfilm master negative is important.
• Is the Library of Congress's National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) a sustainable model? To date, it is expensive and time-consuming.
• Page-level access is less costly than article-level access.
• 8-bit (grayscale) seemed to work better for OCR than 1-bit (black-white).
• Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) has created definitions of digital preservation. The medium-length definition says: "Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time."

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