Shelley, thanks for this. The process started with our director, who asked us to explore getting into digital publishing. Our small team of five(incl directors of Pubs and Communications, and web editor–with advice/expertise from several other museum depts, e.g., Graphics, R&R/Legal, IS) began initial planning just about six months ago. We settled on open-source reader and out-of-print pubs as best way to start. We’ve had a great experience with non-profit IA, who did digitize for us at one of their scanning centers–one we used was Downtown LA. It’s great to see our stuff as part of a serious internet library like IA. Wanted to keep same high standards for digital pubs, so, for example, we proofed all digital books against printed books. Our web editor oversaw the adaptation of IA reader interface with an outside design firm. We are very happy with the results but know there’s sill lots to learn. Thanks for your interest.

Marc, thanks so much for your comments. You’re the first to give us feedback on this aspect. High-res PDFs are essentially print-on-demand publications and we see the value of providing that too. For this first round, we were admittedly focused on online (v. printed) presentation, but this is definitely something worth exploring as we go forward.

Nola

I’d like to offer a couple thoughts and criticisms:

The first book I downloaded as a PDF is “Museum as Site”. The image and text quality is quite poor when the pages are enlarged even slightly. Likewise with other materials viewed directly on the site as they are enlarged. These PDFs wouldn’t print well. While I wouldn’t expect you to necessarily scan these books at 300 dpi, this scan definitely does not take full advantage of what is possible here. These appear to be 72 dpi scans.

One of the great things about PDFs, if the resolution is higher, is that any book can instantly become a large print edition for someone who might be visually impaired. You can blow up the text and it looks fantastic – often much easier to read than the original printing. Details of works of art can become far more noticeable upon enlargement. Scanners see details we would easily miss with our eyes – particularly when they are scanning something like an original drawing but even when they are scanning books.

Again, this is a great path for the museum to go down, but I hope you’ll consider raising the resolution of these scans so that they can have an even greater use value.

This is great news – congrats on this fantastic project and it’s wonderful to see you are using the open source reader from the Internet Archive, that’s super. I’d be interested to hear about your workflow process around the digitization effort. I noticed that the books say they were digitized by the Internet Archive. Is this a service they are willing to provide? Any thoughts on the actual workflow process would be of interest.