[SCC_Active_Members] Linux to Help the Library of Congress Save American History

[Gust, Kathe]

Linux to Help the Library of Congress Save American History
Linux.com (03/28/07) Stutz, Michael 
http://enterprise.linux.com/enterprise/07/03/26/1157212.shtml?tid=101

The preservation of American history is the goal of an ambitious project
the Library of Congress is about to undertake, in which Linux-based
systems will be used to digitize rare and deteriorating public domain
documents and publish them online in various formats. Open source
software's role in this effort will be "absolutely critical," according
to the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle. The chief element is Scribe, a
book-scanning system that combines hardware and free software, and that
has been wholly migrated to Linux by the Internet Archive. The documents
to be scanned will be held in a Linux-based workstation at the Library
of Congress and photographed by two cameras; quality assurance will be
performed by a human operator, and then Scribe will transmit the images
to the Internet Archive in San Francisco, where they will be processed
and ultimately published online in multiple formats. Once scanned and
processed, the digital versions of the documents will be made freely
available online, says the Library of Congress' Dr. Jeremy E.A. Adamson.
Some of the historic materials are so deteriorated and fragile that
placing them in Scribe's V-shaped scanning cradle could damage them
beyond repair, and Adamson says the development of a more formal
classification and description of such debilitated materials and the
establishment of "digitization workflows based on that classification of
condition" are among the project's goals. Should new software and
digitization methods be required to scan such materials, then the
Library of Congress and the Internet Archive will collaborate to make
the tools publicly available.