Photo Illustration: Yifeng Liu

U of A libraries recognized for digitization initiatives

Less searching, more finding — an apt mantra of modern librarians that describes how Geoff Harder, the University of Alberta’s digital initiatives co-ordinator, envisions his mandate.

Harder’s efforts, among others, are moving the University of Alberta’s libraries into the spotlight, most recently for their part in winning a Digging into Data Challenge grant, which aims to adress how “big data” changes have altered the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences.

The Virginia Tech and University of Toronto grant awardees approached the U of A libraries last year with the hopes of using the Peel’s Prairie Provinces digitized newspaper collections to trace the spread of information and disease during the 1918 influenza pandemic. The U.S. Library of Congress was also asked to be involved in the initiative.

“This Digging into Data partnership proves that we are moving in the right direction and that the university is truly making its mark in the world as having a library with collections that are worth sharing,” Harder said.

It’s not the first time the University of Alberta libraries have been involved in such a high-profile initiative either.

A few years ago, Google requested to add the Peel’s Prairie Provinces catalogue of more than 67,000 newspapers into their own newspaper index.

Harder said the latest request reflects the high quality of the U of A’s e-collection of over 4 million digitized articles — the result of digitization standards aimed at maximizing the readability of their e-collections through converting, segmenting, analyzing, and tagging existing hard-copy data.

However, the study is only a small part of the ongoing research and continued digitization at the U of A libraries, with similar granting projects now in the works.

One of these projects aims at literally changing the face of scholarship, with innovative layering techniques that combine different genres of digitized data, such as maps, directories and photographs with computational tools.

It’s a possibility that Acting Chief Librarian Mary-Jo Romaniuk terms “the e-book on steroids.”

Despite the latest technological advances, digitization is unending and far from easy. According to Romaniuk, the U of A libraries will need at least 10 years to convert the current data in their digitization cue.

All this, however, goes into making material more available and user friendly.

“Research data needs to go somewhere, and if it comes from a granting school, it should be publicly available for re-use by others,” Romaniuk explained.

“It needs to be stored and accessible, and in this cool digital world, things need to be interoperable.”

Harder added that digitization is key to supporting scholarship on a very large scale.

“The more we digitize, the more we hear demands from researchers, genealogists, students and the general public, to convert more historical material,” Harder said.

“The premise behind much of this digitization, software development, and linking of data is to remove as many barriers as possible.”

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