Hello, my name is Sara Wick. We are here in the digitisation center in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. - My name is Peter Moerkerk, I'm the head of the digitisation centre. - What are the most important goals of your current digitisation projects. - At the moment, we have four different projects. One thing is catalog enrichment, where we digitise all the new additions to the library and make them available as searchable PDF files. Another project is "Book on Demand", "eBook on Demand". Users are allowed to order books from our catalogue, from before 1900, which we will send back as PDF. This is a Europe-wide project. The biggest project in the library of Zurich is the project DigiTUR, where "TUR" stands for Turicensia. This projects contains everything related to Zurich's history and culture, both from the city and the canton of Zurich. And that's where the directors of the special collection have put together a large amount of material with their staff. They searched through the library collections that represent the history of the city and made it available online to the general public, free of charge and in high quality. The platforms that we use to publish these kind of projects are e-rara and e-manuscripta e-rara is a projects that was founded together with other Swiss libraries: Basel, Berne, Geneva and ETH (Technical University of Zurich) and contains more than 28.000 items. The platform e-manuscripta was founded one-and-a-half years ago by the library of Zurich together with the ETH and the city Basel. At the moment, approximately 15.000 documents can be found on this platform. DigiTUR, is a project where 35 people are currently involved. In my department we already have 6 new employees. and there are 11 librarians in the Graphic Collection, and several librarians in the Department of Ancient Prints as well as in the Conservation Department. They prepare and clean the books, and assess the potential digitisation. The duration of the project DigiTUR is five years. That was one of the lottery fund's requirements. The lottery fund supported us with a very generous donation of almost CHF 10 million. And for these CHF 10 million, we will offer a lot after the expiry. [Laughs] I will give you some numbers. If I remember correctly, we digitised 106 graphical works and photographs, approximately 5000 panorama maps and manuscript map, 130.000 pages of sheet music. almost 8 million pages of printed books, 1 million pages from newspapers. And last but not least - 70.000 pages of handwritings. And because of this diversity of materials, you can perhaps imagine that this is a huge logistical problem. - Exactly, what are the logistic challenges for a library? - To transport the material to the right place at the right time. We have a scanner park with totally 17 scanners from 35mm, negative, to double-A0, oil paintings and manuscript maps. Or panorama maps, with a length of 6 or 7 meters. Bringing all these materials to us in time, and then supplying all these departments with enough material to keep the recently hired people busy is really a big challenge. At the beginning, that was our greatest challenge. Now after almost a year it works fairly well we have enough material to process the single Departments are supplied with sufficient digital copies. An what are they doing with our digitised copies? Some of them are being structured on the platforms. If you happen to have a Bible of 1.500 pages, you surely don't want to look for a certain chapter on every single page. That's what I mean by structuring, it allows you to jump from chapter to chapter. You will know where the preface and the imprint are. We offer a high amount of information These digitised copies can be downloaded as PDF free of charge and with a high quality. The motto of our digitization cener is: Quantity and Quality! That's important! We are not primarily concerned with quantity. That is important, because we are dealing with a lot of data here. But the quality needs to be good. It has to be good in terms of colour and content. All digital copies are being checked for completeness and quality in terms of colour and sharpness. We attach importance to that and that the copies can be used in a sustainable way. We want to avoid users and researchers coming to us and say "well you digitised that book, but 20 pages are missing actually!" Or that folded maps were not digitised and their content is thus missing. No, we will spare no effort to meet these requirements. - What are the technical challenges in order to reach such high quality standards? - It is important to choose the right equipment. We have 12 years of experience with digitization that might sound like a short period, but it is indeed a relatively long time. Yes, 12 years ago we started with the digitization project. We already had a great amount of machines, but now with this amount of data, it is even more important to have equipment that is able to deal with such volume. We used to have fairly good scanners, but now we have even better ones - the quality is high but they are even faster. That is progress! We continuously check the possibilities that we have because it makes a huge difference if it takes 1 minute or 10 seconds to scan something. Then it is important to have different scanners available. For example, a scanner that is able to scan the smallest book that we have with 1.8 cm. Or our largest panorama map with almost 8 meters. We also have a huge selection of devices, even with different opening angles. Our Conservation Department dictates which opening angle we are allowed to use, and we can apply scanners with 30° to 60°, 90° and 180°. And we also have machines that scan with glass. Well, we have materials that can be pressed lightly under glass. But we also have other materials, like illuminated manuscripts that under no circumstances should come into contact with glass, because the gold could jump off. For all these different problems we have a suitable machine. - Very well. And for a sustainable storage, what are the challenges there? We were supported in an excellent way by our IT team. That's how it is nowadays in the world of the libraries there are no projects without the contribution of IT. And also for digitization IT is needed. One of the challenges was: We had totally 16 scanners at the same time and we scan 400 dpi (dots per inch) and we scan directly on the server. The lines needed to deal with this amount of data, first of all. And that's where they supported us. We got faster ports and switches and gigabit lines. At the beginning, we bought our first scanner and needed to wait for 20 seconds because it needed some time to save the digital copies. But now, everything is real time and there are no more bottlenecks during scanning. We are able to save the copies and also save redundantly. Great attention is paid to modern storage material and storage systems and longterm safeguarding of the recorded data. We were able to build a new computer centre, down here in the basement. And I have to praise our IT department for that. It works perfectly fine. You can imagine that there is nothing more tragic than working for 5 entire years and then everything is gone. [laugh] That's a catastrophe, just try to imagine. - Yes, that wouldn't be good. - No, it wouldn't. - Thank you very much. - You're welcome. - We have another expert here with us. She will introduce herself. - I am Madeleine Boxler, and I work at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich as a specialist for German studies. And I also deal with questions of digital humanities and research data. What kind of visions does a library like the Zentralbibliothek have in terms of availability of digital copies in the field of Digital Humanities? - In my opinion, it is really important that we provide appropriate metadata. At the moment we have digitised image copies that are accessible via library catalogue and specialised platforms like e-rara and e-manuscripta. And they are also provided with a DOI, i. e. they can be referenced permanently and are thus also useful in science. But that is not enough for the demands of science in the longer term. I think, we need to find solutions within concrete projects dependent on their individual needs in order to adjust the metadata in a more detailed way. We should make the data accessible and searchable, i.e. full texts should thus be available in machine-readable form. A keyword would be: XML format. And the texts should be structured according to the TEI guidelines. Especially for the automatic modelling and for the long-term archiving at a later stage. And this is where we could provide tools on the different platforms to be able to transcribe the handwritings and store them in a suitable format. - For one thing, these meta data are important for the library, but digitised copies can also be used in other fields of action. Can you add something? - You are right. The fields of action for a library are the disposition of digitised copies in the right form on the one hand, but it can go beyond that, we can also act as consultants. So, we can point to the right platforms, the right infrastructures. We can then also generate additional material for the data itself, by using linked open data technologies and link the items to their corresponding web resources. By this means, you can offer annotations or bibliographies, for example, which would be the digitised copy at the beginning. But we also want to support the process of incorporating research data in general by guiding this process and that we offer support regarding the long-term storage of such data. Another important keyword is "reusability" that needs to be guaranteed for research data. And I think, that also in this case, libraries can support such a process.
