On Demand Book Service

Hi Systems.

Not sure where to post this question on moodle so... here is an email.

I have been looking at this site www.ouroots.ca which is a large digital collection of historical documents.

Here is a sample resource: http://www.ourroots.ca/e/page.aspx?id=3927776
Would this be the kind of thing that could be printed, using our technology.

When I print, I get the image and a side search bar. I have attached some text from teh "About Us" section of the website.
-Jesslyn

Technical info

Our Roots employs standards consistent with academic and industry practice for digitization of paper documents. The industry standard TIFF format with LZW compression is used for high-quality archival digital images. Documents are scanned at original size at 300 dpi in 8-bit greyscale mode to preserve as much of the original document information as possible. When documents are in colour, 24-bit RGB scans are made.

As the chosen standard for archiving generates large files, Our Roots uses 4 sizes to provide on-line delivery to the user: a 200x200 pixel thumbnail for quick reference, and three sizes (600 pixels high, 768 pixels high and 1000 pixels high) for more detailed examination and usage. On-line delivery files are created as JPG images at a medium compression level, balancing onscreen quality with overall size of download.

Our Roots uses a modified Dublin Core record as the basis of its descriptive metadata. The project has benefited from the work already done by librarians in the item-level cataloguing of the books that Our Roots has digitized. Where available, descriptive metadata is drawn from library catalogues such as the National Library of Canada, the University of Calgary library and the Laval University Library. Items without existing records are catalogued by trained cataloguers following AACR2 rules.

Each item in Our Roots has an index page that provides an interactive table of contents to that volume. A Dublin Core header will be added to each of these index pages to provide harvesting of each individual volume.

In addition to the descriptive metadata, administrative and structural metadata are also added to each item-record. Plans are in progress to standardize the overall record on the Library of Congress METS standard for encoding metadata.

One of the guiding principles for Our Roots is to provide a simple interface to the resources. Complex client-side scripting and the usage of plug-ins is avoided where possible. Pages are created using standard HTML 4.0 code. The majority of the scripting and validation occurs at the server level.

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Hi Jesslyn,

Thanks for your e-mail. I took a look at the site. It might depend on how the portal accesses their content. If it's just a link to their site, then I guess you print what you see, and they don't have a printer-friendly option. I noticed that the pages are jpg images (e.g. http://www.ourroots.ca/e/roots/6bo/6bob0008.jpg). I don't know if we could somehow pull the jpgs directly from the site for viewing through the portal and then control how it's printed, but this would also require knowing the location of each jpg image. It might be slow too. Or maybe we could grab all the images and put them on the portal server. Sorry, I don't have an answer on how this would work. Overall, I guess it depends on what the site would let us do.

I've been looking at some of the copyright notices on various sites, and unless the work is stated to be in the public domain, it seems that the majority of it still requires getting permission directly from the author in order to disseminate their work, even though the site where it's published is a not-for-profit site. The site may have received rights to publish the author's work, but it states that the author retains the copyright. Also, I noticed that some sites may be offering free e-books to draw people to their site, so they may prefer that people access the content directly from their site or that there be some form of acknowledgement and link back to the site.

Regarding digital formats, I don't think it has to affect the categorization of resources or at least maybe that info can be added later. Maybe we can filter searches by digital formats, but not necessarily search by digital formats.

Hope this is helpful!

Sal

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Thanks Sally, That is a lot to think about and great information about the permissions.

Could ODBS be as simple as a Printer Name setting...
For example, when someone uses the ODBS portal, to get to a site, such as Our Roots, could they decide to print the image, but in the ODBS printer settings or something. This could mitigate the permissions issue a bit. Or is that too simplified, anyway just an idea.

Thanks for your help!
Jesslyn

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You're welcome, Jesslyn! We're still working on how the print process would work. I think with permissions, the issue is not just with the printing but with the work being disseminated through the portal. Probably most people wouldn't care since it's for non-commercial use, but it might be safer to ask.

Thanks!
Sal