Digitsation on Demand in Academic Research Libraries

Ed Chamberlain

Libraries are under increasing pressure to provide new services as they adapt to the networked environment. In addition to maintaining large physical collections, they have become custodians of digital collections comprised of digital surrogates of print collections and born-digital material.

Despite recent developments in screen reader technology, many readers still prefer a print copy of a work, especially when getting to grips with a text. Publishers and booksellers are already adopting print on demand business models around out of print, in print and born-digital material. With this in mind, it is clear that scan and print-on-demand services represent an opportunity to leverage existing digitisation infrastructure and the considerable corpus of out of print material a library may hold, especially for a legal deposit library such as Cambridge.

A reader driven selection model is envisaged, starting with a request initiated in the library catalogue and ending in a digital surrogate made publically available, with the option of a printed bound facsimile being delivered to the by post to the requestor. No current such service operates in the UK within a library service on the scale of Cambridge.

Various potential barriers exist, including calculating the amount of material available for digitisation and reproduction, given copyright legislation in the UK. This can be partially mitigated by automated intelligent analysis of bibliographic metadata to assess the copyright status of a work. Software to perform this function is known as a copyright calculator. It is already in place at the National Library of Australia and is driving a print on demand service. Other problem areas include bulk digitisation methods, the storage and curation of large amounts of digital surrogates and methods of printing and delivery.

Given these challenges, a term long Arcadia fellowship investigating a wide scale scan-on-demand service for Cambridge University Libraries is proposed. It would focus on potential workflows, systems integration and identifying potential solutions for the problem areas noted above.