Case Studies:

Digitization (Scanning, Indexing, Metadata) of 100 years of British Birds: the complete multimedia contents fully searchable on DVD-ROM

BirdGuides Ltd and British Birds publish the British Birds interactive on DVD-ROM

BirdGuides Limited is a British company that produces videos, books and multimedia computer software for birdwatchers. The company offers up-to-the-minute news and views on British and Irish birds, comprehensive online and mobile reference, a huge photo library and the best products for birdwatchers everywhere.

The British Birds interactive DVD-ROM offers a whole bookcase of material on one disk. SunTec has digitized and made searchable the entire contents of the journal for the last 100 years. The interactive journal is a treasure trove for all the followers of British ornithology. That's every article including photographs, illustrations and over 40,000 pages of text.

Highlights:

Digitization of Journals: the content from the hard copies had to be scanned, indexed and converted into HTML format. The contents had to be made searchable to ensure that they are interactive, can be easily filtered and display articles, photographs and illustrations quickly.

Client requirements:

To convert the textual content from hardcopies to an electronic format economically, BirdGuides Ltd. approached SunTec Web Services, that has a proven expertise in data conversion jobs in an accurate and cost-effective manner. SunTec has executed similar projects with success for some of the major publication houses, world government agencies and academic institutions.

Challenges:

• Journals consisting of over 40,000 pages of text dated back to the year 1907 onwards. Majority of them were old and in a fragile condition.

• Due to the crumbling condition of the journals and to secure their preservation in hardcopy format, SunTec was required to resort to manual scanning.

• Most of the journals included photographs and illustrations. These images had to be optimized for the web.

• We were also required to index the main headings from the chapters and all zoological terms for the bird for each of the journals.

• As the text had to be converted into HTML format we were supposed to apply web design specific style sheets.

• The entire digitization and conversion of the content required 99.99%.

Implementation:

SunTec started with the manual scanning of the journals. We indexed the headings and zoological terms for birds. We optimized the photographs and illustrations, using latest PDF / Image compression software, which convert PDF, TIFF and JPEG files into compressed, Web-optimized and text-searchable PDF files. The benefits from PDF conversion and compression include greatly reduced storage requirements and substantially shorter download times.

Our experts worked on creating the metadata and index to enable the end-user to search, filter and display all the articles, photos and illustrations in ways not feasible with physical journals. This would allow:

• Text and image search with powerful filtering

• Instant access to a wealth of information including all the BBRC Rarities Reports

• Locate articles by species, author, photographer or descriptive terms

• Includes photographs and illustrations

• Interactive multimedia access to thousands of articles

• View the content in a number of ways – Full Screen, Split-Screen or Thumbnail mode

• Filter the information on display.