Decapod: A Flexible, Low Cost Digitization Solution for Small and Medium Archives

摘要

Scholarly content needs to be online, and for much mass produced content, that migration has already happened. Unfortunately, the online presence of scholarly content is much more sporadic for long tail material such as small journals, original source materials in the humanities and social sciences, non-journal periodicals, and more. A large barrier to this content being available is the cost, and complexity of setting up a digitization project for small and scattered collections coupled with a lack of revenue opportunities to recoup those costs. Collections with limited audiences and hence limited revenue opportunities are nonetheless often of considerable scholarly importance within their domains. The expense and difficulty of digitization presents a significant obstacle to making such paper archives available online. To address this problem, the Decapod project aims at providing a. solution that is primarily suitable for small to medium paper archives with material that is rare or unique and is of sufficient interest that it warrants being made more widely available. This paper gives an overview of the project and presents its current status.