Early American Fiction Project Workflow
Book Handling
Prior to scanning, selected volumes are pulled from the stacks, inspected,
and relocated to the digital lab. The books remain in the lab until they
have been digitized, have a TEI header form, and the jpeg derivatives
have been checked.
Workflow Database
Each book is given a record in a FileMaker Pro database.
With the book in hand, the EAF staff records information into the FileMaker
Pro database:
- bibliographical information
- EAF project number
- call number
- notes on form and condition
- digitization dates
- camera operators
Upon volume imaging completion, the FileMaker Pro record is filtered
to a TEI header.
Parsing, tiff header integration and quality assurancewill be done by
the Electronic Text Center staff. AACR-2 compliance and MARC record generation
will be conducted by the UVa Special Collections Cataloging Department.
Digital Image Creation
File-naming convention: [xxx-001]
- For images, the suffix will always be .tif-- supplied by PhotoShop
(.jpg after the conversion) and for texts, .xml -- supplied by our web
forms.
- The first three numbers will be a project number assigned to the book,
followed by a dash.
- In the event that a volume has more than 1000 pages the next four
slots will be free for sequential digital image numbers. This means
that the image number does not reflect the pagination scheme but it
overcomes the need to deal with unnumbered pages, preliminary numbering,
repeated numbers due to printer error, etc.
- The eighth character is to remain blank as a safeguard against a missed
image that needs to be numbered after the fact.
Stay within 8.3 DOS limits for all files and directories. Do not use
spaces in either file names or directory names. The 8.3 file limit is
essential for ISO 9660 conformance, to accomodate DOS, Windows, and CD
production (all of our CDs will adhere to ISO 9660).
See the EAF Digital Image Scanning Procedures for a detailed description of camera operation, software settings, imaging, batching, and database tracking.
Conversion to JPEG
Run the batch-processing scripts in PhotoShop to produce a large JPEG
file. From these we will generate gif thumbnails and two other levels
of jpeg files..
From the large JPEG version:
- GIF: mogrify -format gif -interlace plane -geometry 5% *.jpg
- MEDIUM JPEG: mogrify -geometry 75% -quality 75% *.jpg
- SMALL JPEG: mogrify -geometry 50% -quality 75% *.jpg
The aim is to keep the jpegs a known and predictable percentage of the
original, so that they maintain relative size differences (e.g. an image
of a small book looks smaller than an image of a large one.)
For examples of dual-quality jpegs see the following:
Text Processing
JPG files are uploaded to vendor's FTP site for processing
according to a "Data Conversion Design Document" (currently
Revision 1.3). The goal of the vendor is to reproduce the source
in every aspect, including capturing line breaks and page breaks
at the exact location as in the source.
Every <divx> has a <head> in the C-H scheme as in TEI, but the
head is numbered along with the <divx> -- a <div0> takes a <comhd0>,
a <div1> takes a <comhd1>, etc. At present, we think we will use
the n= attribute to record this information : <head n="comhd1">. This
will be easy to change to <comhd1> for C-H purposes.
The <text> tag in TEI cannot take a <head> itself, but its C-H
equivalent needs a <head> and an <attrib> field. One solution is
to add a <div1 type="chad"> at the top of every <front> before the
real <front> matter, and move it up before teh <front> for the C-H
format. Its <head> -- <head n=comhd0> -- contains a <bibl> containing
the full, inverted author name (<author>) and the volume short title
(<title>), including the date of publication in parentheses.
We still need to decide the precise form of the tags in the <text>
that correspond to the C-H <attribs> group: <attauth>, <attgend>,
<attgenre>, <attdate>, and <attbal> for full author name, author
sex, genre of work, date of publication, and Bibliography of American
Literature number. A <ref type="attribs"> containing a <bibl>
is possible as a container for this information, within the <div1 type="chad">.
The end result needs to be a parsed TEI document that can be automatically
re-shaped in a couple of details to form a C-H document.
Vendor Guidelines for tagging
Contract out to bid.
Guide for image description : <figDesc>
Book illustrations and other figurative content will be described as
to its content, for searching purposes, using the TEI <figure>
tag.
Procedures for parsing, indexing, and testing completed texts when
returned from the keyboarders
Will follow usual ETC practices. In particular, we will be checking for
unintentinally minimized tags during parsing. The TEI.DTD allows minimization,
but we do not want it. to guard against this, run the parser as:
nsgmls -s -w unclosed -w min-tag FILENAME
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