CALIcon Session of the Day: Prep it, Scan it, and Describe it: Production Tools and Techniques for Description and Rapid Digitization of Manuscripts and Texts

Paul Deschner and Stephen Chapman of the Harvard Law School Library Lab will report on the tools and techniques that project teams have been using to describe and rapidly and cheaply digitize collections. Through digitization, we aim to deliver research collections to the classroom—and freely via the web—to faculty, students, and scholars not only interested in accessing historic materials, but also enriching them by using tools for tagging. We will highlight the most recent phase of digitizing archival documents from the Nuremberg Trials of military, political and other leaders of Nazi Germany (the “Nuremberg Trials Project”), where staff prepped 4,285 folders (in 360 boxes) and scanned 413,647 document pages in 15 weeks. As of CALI 2015, we will also be able to share findings from a three-month experiment testing tools for document discovery and tagging.