Date   : Mon, 25 Jun 2001 22:44:21 +0200
From   : Isabel Cisternas & Robert Schmidt <rschmidt@...>
Subject: Re: Scanning of BBC Magazines

I ("The BBC Lives!") would be happy to host whatever amount is needed. 
I'm sure others will volunteer, too, so how about a joint effort, either
by splitting the load, or by redundant mirroring?

All we need is to agree on quality standards (DPI, color quality), and
preferably on file naming standards.

There should be one high quality, lossless format to store scans before
somebody volunteers to OCR them, and one OCRed format (PDF, RTF, DOC and
HTML could all be considered, but one should be chosen).

I've seen some pretty amazing work done on material scanned and OCRed
into PDF.  Not sure if this can be done with Acrobat out of the box, but
some kind of OCRed format seems essential to me.

A format worth considering is the new "JPEG 2000" - the compression
ratios are spectacular - not quite sure how it preserves printed text,
though.

Mark's idea of chopping up each mag sounds barbaric, especially to the
owner.  However, I, for one, would prefer to have the mags available
electronically rather than physically.


Just my thoughts,
Robert