Tag Archives: uc libraries

New YouTube Channel + Our Virtual Lab Tour Recording

The Preservation Lab now has it’s own YouTube channel!! We have a selection of videos including how-to videos, such as How to Make a Non-adhesive Paper Slipcase or Sewing an Unsupported French Link Stitch, and treatment, documentation and outreach videos, like Preserving Your Personal Library or RTI Capture Session of a Large Cuneiform Tablet.

New YouTube Channel + Our Virtual Lab Tour Recording

One of our most recent additions to our channel is the recording of our Virtual Lab Tour and Live Q&A, hosted by the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library, which took place on Tuesday. If you weren’t able to join us live, please take a look; it was a very fun event and we had so many great questions from our live viewers.

Make sure to subscribe to our channel so that you can stay up to date on any new videos we add! And don’t forget to like videos, and we’d love to hear about what you’d like to see more of from us in the future.

Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Tech & Photographic Documentation Specialist

What’s New in Digital Collections

Did you know that UC Libraries’ Digital Collections & Preservation Librarian, James Van Mil, and Digital Imaging Coordinator, Sidney Gao, have recently created a website and blog to share their digital collections documentation? No?  Well, head on over and check it out: https://uclibs.github.io/digitization-workflow/  It covers all their hard work establishing UCL’s digital collection strategy, selection guidelines, accessibility standards, and so much more.  As they continue to work to create a more robust and thoughtful digitization and digital preservation program for UCL this site will continue to evolve and grown and they will share their progress along the way via the blog.

In their very first blog post they tackled the important subject of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and accessibility.  Sidney shared their results from a recent experiment to see which OCR software performed the best under six document tests.  They employed and tested six OCR softwares, some of which are proprietary and some that are open source: ABBYY Finereader for Mac, Google Cloud Vision, Tranksribus, Equidox, Adobe Acrobat Pro, and Tesseract. 

What’s New in Digital Collections

Here is a preview of the six documents that Sidney and James tested:

  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test One
  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test Two
  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test Three
  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test Four
  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test Five
  • What’s New in Digital Collections
    Test Six

To see how these six OCR softwares performed and how they stack up to their competitors, head on over to their blog and check out their results: https://uclibs.github.io/digitization-workflow/2020/08/07/ocr-comparison.html  James and Sidney do plan to conduct further OCR tests in the future, so make sure to subscribe to their site in order to receive notification when they share the results from the next round.

If you have any direct questions for Sidney or James, you can find their contact information here.

Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Photographic Documentation Specialist (in working with Sidney Gao [UCL] – Digital Imaging Coordinator)