In October 2006, the Cornell University Library (CUL) announced that it had signed a contract with Microsoft to digitize thousands of books in its collection and add them to Microsoft’s Live Book Search. Just a few weeks later, the Library sent its first shipment of material to Kirtas Technologies, a Microsoft subcontractor, for digital processing. Since then, CUL has sent nearly 25,000 volumes to Kirtas for digitization and processed nearly 200 rare items locally on a Kirtas-supplied machine housed in the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Managing an operation of this scale requires a lot of planning and coordination, and LTS staff are deeply involved with both. Jim LeBlanc, Head of Database Management Services, and Zoe Stewart-Marshall, Electronic Resources Librarian in E-Resources & Serials Management, are members of the LSD Steering Group. Jim is primarily focused on bibliographic control and record maintenance issues; Zoe chairs the LSD Annex Task Group. Margaret Nichols, Head of the Special Collections Unit in Cataloging Services, is a member of the LSD RMC Task Group and oversees the collection management aspect of in-house digitization of rare items. Both Jim and Zoe are currently working with D-LIT and Mann ITS staff on access issues and workflows related to serving these e-books through Voyager in the near future so users can access the full text directly from the CUL catalog.
Other units within DMS are involved in more hands-on processing, chiefly clean-up associated with the book shipments. As Collection Management staff pull material from the stacks (using pick lists generated by Discovery Systems and Services), they route items lacking barcodes or with obvious call number problems to the DMS Database Enrichment Unit, where Barb Tarbox and Ken Tiddick fix these problems on a rush basis in order to get them out to Kirtas in the proper shipment. As soon as the items leave the Uris Library loading dock, Collection Management posts an announcement to LTS’s batch processing e-list (CTSBULK-L), indicating the circulation dates associated with the shipment and the shipment date, prompting Barb or DMS’s Natalya Pikulik to run an automated script that maps LSDI data into a MARC 903 field in the bibliographic record.
When the material is returned from the vendor, items that were not digitized for one reason or another are routed to Ken for BIB 903 update and further processing, if needed. Ken also identifies items with physical processing defects (for example, loose or non-existent call number labels) and titles that may be candidates for “Medium Rare” processing and routes them to Deb Warfield’s Database Quality and Physical Processing Unit for further treatment. Jena Bakula, Administrative Supervisor of DMS’s Batch Processing & Metadata Management Unit, with help from recently retired Nancy Holcomb, has already developed a bibliographic record template for the e-books, which we will use to create Voyager catalog records programmatically as soon as CUL starts to receive URL manifests for the digitized texts from Microsoft
LTS’s role in CUL’s Large-Scale Digitization Initiative is a good example of how a lot of technical services work has become a mélange of inter-divisional planning and coordination, along with hybrid automated and manual processing.
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