Preserving History for Future Learning
To continue their mission to provide advancing education, research, scholarships, and improve health care, this Association required help with converting their historical books into digital files. This Association values the history and resources it provides to its community and wanted to preserve them for future use. The opportunity to make historical resources easily accessible from anywhere created an opportunity to expand the resources they provide to their membership.
The Challenge
The Association’s historical files and books dated back to the early 1900s. They wanted to preserve the quality and condition of these items, limiting natural degradation that comes with normal use, while at the same time providing easy access. Some books were able to be cut and unbound while others needed to remain in their original format.
The Solution
The NOS Professional Services Solutions team was brought in early to understand the nature of the historical files and books and worked closely with the Association to understand which ones needed to remain bound. The unbound books were scanned using a high-volume scanner, and the bound books were scanned by a flatbed book scanner. As an additional quality control feature, each digital file was run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and quality control process immediately after scanning was complete. Instituting an OCR process allows for a digital searchable format of multi-page PDFs. These files were uploaded to the associations network and a content management system was installed to provide easy access for their members from anywhere in the world. An additional benefit to digitally converting these historical files and books is they were able to minimize their filing cabinet and shelving space and offer additional space for administration and common areas. This new space was put to good use by the growing association. With an initial goal of preserving these historical books they were not only able to make them more accessible to their members but also find more space in their existing office to better serve their membership as a whole.
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