Accelerating Discovering Through Digitization - A Strategic Overview of EAL’s Digitization Initiatives

IntroductionThere are rich special collections in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library (EAL), University of California, Berkeley. Making them accessible to scholars and the public has been a goal of the library since digitization technology was available. Our special collections are in a variety of formats including:Ancient texts/manuscriptsMapsImagesPostersPhotosGame sheetsRubbingsProject Portfolio OverviewWith more than 15 years of efforts, EAL has completed digitization of 18 special collections in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English language. Some of the collections are unique and rare that nowhere else holds similar materials, such as Chinese film posters, Chinese revolutionary posters, Japanese historical maps, Works by western missionaries on the Chinese language and its dialects, New age novels of the Late Qing Dynasty (1895). In selection of special collections tobe digitized, we mainly consider funding support, scholarly value, complexity, copyright issues, metadata availability, etc. Some of the digital collections have been widely used. Highlighted projects will be elaborated in my full paper.Tools, Technologies & PartnershipsThe digital collection platform our library uses is TIND DA, which hosts more than 1,000 collections from Bancroft, EAL and other subject libraries. TIND DA has been designed to host materials in a variety of format including books, maps, images, newspapers, audios and videos. Its metadata table can handle descriptions of materials in different formats. It also has the capacity to display Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Working closely with the Library IT Department, EAL librarians and staff prepare metadata for our digitization projects either through cataloging or creating metadata in Excel spreadsheets. We have learned a great deal from doing it.Challenges & Lesson LearnedLike everyone else, we have experienced pain points and challenges, which including but not limited to finding funding sources, managing external vendors, creating workflows, temporary image storage, manually creating metadata, additional workload of cataloging collections to be digitized. Some of the lessons we have learned:Agree on technical standards (image spec etc) with library IT in advanceDo it right the first time (high quality, proper format etc)Know how metadata are displayed and organized at the digitization collection portal (TIND DA)Know technical workflow and requirements as early as possibleHave collections cataloged before digitization if all possibleDecide on if we have the manpower to catalog materials to be digitizedDecide on if we have manpower to manually process metadata for materials that cannot be catalogedOn-going and Future ProjectsChinese film postersChee Kung Tong ArchiveChinese movie periodicals, pre-1950