Dear
All,
Please forgive a contribution from a
geriatric. As long ago as 1987, this writer was paid to undertake research upon
all the issues for digitising sound collections, and a pilot project was set up.
This included attempts at digitising LP sleeves, as well as the sound
inside. As a copyright-deposit library, we in Britain were permitted to make
copies for reasons of preservation and access, and my report was published (I
don't have it here, so I can't give you a reference!)
We transferred about twenty LPs and
digitised their sleeves. Three issues arose, which have not so far been
addressed in this discussion :
(1)
Aliassing occured between pixels and half-tone pictures, unless both
excellent equipment and viewing-conditions were assured, so the operator could
minimise the aliassing.
(2)
The text (generally on the back of the LP sleeve) needed optical character
recognition, (a) so it might be translated, and (b) so it might be sent down a
wire to British Library listener, who might manipulate it to make it more
readable, or conduct a word-search. The OCR software was almost impotent with
proper nouns!
(3)
Five years after we did those twenty sleeves, the software was out of
date.
Peter
Copeland