John Burns Skype Meeting Notes (May 15, 2009)

Date of Meeting: May 15, 2009
In attendance: Jess Mitchell, James Yoon, Jacob Farber, Jonathan Hung, John Burns

About JStor

JStor: scans, stores, makes available scholarly journals, across disciplines
Initially JStor was trying to help solve the storage crisis in libraries (i.e. Too many books, not enough space)
JStor is more than just about saving bookshelf space now.
There are 5000 institutions participating in JStor.
Bulk of offerings are journals.
Recent journals are scanned when published, held and released after a period of time

publisher just gives permission. Everything else is done by JStor.
Finding full run of a journal is hard
Find a whole run, send it off to somewhere to be scanned.
Finding missing journals in a run is hard and getting it scanned is difficult and expensive.
o Going into collections to fill in the gaps is one place where Decapod can come in.
Digitizing pamphlets (screeds) now and art auction catalogs (social interest)

No consumer grade end-to-end solution for digitization
originals are valuable.
o owners not willing to let the objects out of their property.
o State-run collections (like archaeological artifacts) are locked up
portable station is important to solve this problem of security.
How to recruit and train scanners and somehow generate well-structured PDFs
o Ease of use important to getting volunteers up and running quickly with little overhead.
Send out transcription to other sites (does this mean scanning of actual books? -JH)

Summary of Main operations

Reflow

Dynamic font generation

Reflow + Dynamic font generation = Success on mobile devices

Mobile devices are mostly small screen
Therefore need to be able to reformat the flow (i.e. from 2 column to single tight column) while maintaining the look of the original work
o (i.e. if no embedded font, you won't be able to determine where to wrap text on the smaller screen).

Zoning

Categorize and mark regions on a page.
Possible interactions
o One click - software automatically detects regions
o Drag boundaries / bounding box
Typing of regions
a problem at JStor

What intelligence does the software have?

how does it know when it runs into problems
automatic quality control?
o what exactly is this? How will it deal with bad situations? How will the user be notified?
o Thomas already seems to have something in place, but what is it exactly and what control does the user have?

Old documents may not have a document structure.
o tell the program how many columns etc, to redice false alarm rate

How do you dela with patent books?
o some flow, but mostly diagrams and annotations.
o in this case, tell program not to even attemp to reflow a page - don't even attempt document analysis.

Marginalia
o stuff in margins are sometimes important or not.
o currently feels to disregard this kind of stuff because of its vastly complicated.

Maps
o know when to stop processing as text and deal with pages of illustrations / maps.

Rezoning
o present alternatives simultaneously and pic which zones are correct. (John Burns likes this).

Problems with OCR old books:

"transfer" ink from one side imprints on opposite

"bleedthrough"

Metric: Confidence?

John Burns to Toronto - June 8?

JB anticipates two Pilots:
1 - user testing on UI early.
2 - prototype into hands of early adopters.

Dina Markham - national archives.

can't let out artifacts from facility.
Public accessible digital replicas and portable digitization station more convenient for getting people to see collections.

Dave Simski?

Software