As institutions strive to make more of their archival collections accessible through digitization, methods that yield high quality color jp2 images and searchable text, at low cost, open up a lot of possibilities. In the fall of 2014, the Harvard Law School Library Digital Lab team, partnering with Historical & Special Collections staff, successfully adapted the Library’s in-house use of an ibml ImageTrac 3 high speed scanner, primarily used for the mass digitization of published materials, to digitize material from the library’s Nuremberg Trials Collection. Dealing with 360 boxes of largely unprocessed primary source material from nine of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, the team overcame the many issues this heterogeneous collection presented to meet the challenge of processing and digitizing over 414,000 document pages in 18 weeks.
Keys to the success of our approach were building an agile project team that worked in close proximity and employing available technology to track and organize the material throughout the workflow. The team was able to produce thousands of color jp2 images per day, with virtually no rework required, and a fully processed collection of the analog material. This platform presentation will emphasize lessons learned from this experiment in the mass digitization of archival material, highlighting the resulting workflows, techniques, and tools used throughout the project that could readily be applied in successfully digitizing other archival collections.
About the Author:
Lindsay Dumas is the Digital Projects Archivist in the Library Innovation Lab (LIL) at Harvard Law School Library, where she coordinates digitization projects large and small. She holds aMA in Archives and Public History from New York University and a BA in History from Providence College.
