READIT - 2009 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Proceedings of READIT-2009, Kalpakkam - 603 102, 29-30 Dec 2009
7.3 Content Creation
Content creation has two distinct aspects. The first to convert existing non-electronic
holdings to electronic holdings and the second to have a vision to be alert to have the soft
copy (e-version) of all the newly generated documents (generated by the organization –
reports, research findings etc.) or acquired holdings. The most important and the difficult and
time-consuming aspect of a digital library is the content creation. The process of selection,
convention, editing, cataloging and publishing the digital data is most demanding and labor
intensive. Libraries are forced to establish a content creation section that has to consist of
both multimedia and scanning units. To digitize any document, the basic requirement is the
need to have a suitable scanner. Multimedia section can also go together for adding visual
and sound information. Every effort has to be taken to acquire the electronic form of the
publication from the author at the time of submission for archival. The published documents
have to be digitized retrospectively, whenever e-version is not available.
There are varieties of scanners available from desktop to publication scanner.
Libraries must select suitable and adequate scanner. Some of the scanner types are
1. Desktop Scanner – for scanning small documents, photos etc. Less Cost, Speed.
2. Image Scanner – for high resolution /quality scanning for images/photos.
3. Document Scanner –for scanning bulk of materials, high speed, high capacity.
4. Publication Scanner – for scanning bound documents.
The necessary software to convert the scanned TIF images to OCR or PDF format is also
required. The most commonly used software products are:
• Twain drive compatible scanning software for image capture
• Omni Page Pro / Adobe Capture for OCR conversion
• Photo Shop / Adobe Suite for editing and
• Adobe Acrobat Suite for Conversion to PDF
8. INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL (ISR)
Digitized documents must be archived into database and must be made available /
accessible from user desktops across the campus connected via an intranet. Fig.1. Illustrates
the various steps involved in digitizing and archiving of E-Documents.
After being scanned, the readability of document has to be checked and the quality
has to be ensured. In case the quality is not satisfactory it has to be improved either by means
of rescanning or scanning with better resolution. The scanned items must be reprocessed into
textual format using OCR, which makes the documents “readable” by the system. After
quality check, the documents have to be catalogued / indexed and should be stored into
database along with the OCR information. The next step after archiving is to make the
documents available for retrieval from user’s desktops. For this a good search engine has to
be available which users should be able to utilise effectively to find the relevant documents
by using key word search. Desktop access can be provided by designing a suitable web site
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