A Digital Delivery System
The roots of the electronic library are found in landmark papers by Bush (1945) and Kemeny (1962). Most interestingly, Kemeny foreshadowed what prospective scholarly users of our digital library told us was their essential requirement, which was that they be able to see each page of a scholarly article preserved in its graphical integrity. That is, the electronic image of each page layout needed to look like it did when originally published on paper. The system we have developed uses the ACROBATR page description language to accomplish this objective.
Because finding aids and indices for specialized publications are too limiting, users also have the requirement that the article's text be searchable with limited or unlimited discipline-specific thesauri. Our system complements the page images with an optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of the complete text of each article. In this way, the user may enter words and phrases the presence of which in an article constitutes a "hit" for the scholar.
One of the most critical design goals for our project was the development of a scanning subsystem that would be easily reproducible and cost efficient to set up and operate in each consortium member library. Not only did the equipment need to be readily available, but it had to be adaptable to a variety of work flow and staff work patterns in many different libraries. Our initial design has been successfully tailored to the needs of both the CWRU libraries and the Library at the Univer-
sity of Akron. Our approach to the sharing of paper-based collections is to use a scanning device to copy the pages of the original into a digital image format that may be readily transmitted across our existing telecommunications infrastructure. In addition, the digital version of the paper is stored for subsequent retrieval. Thus, repeated viewing of the same work would necessitate only a one-time transformation of format. This procedure is an advantage in achieving faster response times for scholars, and it promotes the development and use of quality control methods. The scanning equipment we have used in this project and its operation are described in Appendix E. The principal advantage of this scanner is that bound serials may be scanned without damaging the volume and without compromising the resulting page images; in fact, the original journal collection remains intact and accessible to scholars throughout the project. This device is also sufficiently fast that a trained operator, including students, may scan over 800 pages per average workday. For a student worker making $7.00 per hour, the personcost of scanning is under $0.07 per page; the cost of conversion to searchable text adds $0.01 per page. Appendix E also gives more details regarding the scanning processes and work flow. Appendix F gives a technical justification for a digitization standard for the consortium. Thus, each consortium member is expected to make a reasonable investment in equipment, training, and personnel.
The target equipment for viewing an electronic journal was taken to be a common PC-compatible computer workstation, hereafter referred to as a client. This client is also the user platform for the on-line library catalog systems found on our campuses as well as for the growing collections of CD-ROM-based information products. Appendix B gives the specification of the workstation standards for the project. The implications for use of readily available equipment is that the client platform for our project would also work outside of the library-in fact, wherever a user wanted to work. Therefore, by selecting the platform we did, we extended the project to encompass a full campuswide delivery system. Because our consortium involves multiple campuses (two at the outset), the delivery system is general purpose in its availability as an access facility.
Just as we needed a place to store paper-based journals within the classical research library, we needed to specify a place to store the digital copies. In technical parlance, this storage facility is called a server. Appendixes B and C give some details regarding the server hardware and software configurations used in this project.
Appendix C also gives some information regarding the campuswide networks on both our campuses and the statewide network that connects them. It is important to note that any connected client workstation that follows our minimum standards will be able to use the digital delivery system being constructed.
Because the key to minimizing the operating costs within a consortium is interoperability and standardization, we have adopted a series of data and equipment standards for this project; they are given in Appendixes A and B.