Spring Day Pancakes

Tuks Spring Day with a touch of cinnamon

The Tuks Spring Day events were cancelled the day before the scheduled date and that left us with lots of props, snacks and no plan. A meeting was held to come up with a plan B because the stuff which had been purchased had to be used and either way the day was still declared a holiday for the students and half day for the staff. In the meeting it was decided upon that we should have spring day pancakes. An email was circulated inviting all Library personnel to the kitchen during tea time for a surprise. On the morning of 7 September 2011 we put final touches to the props, hung them in the kitchen, set up plates and cups and started making pancakes. There were lots of pancakes. The people came and we had a lovely spring day celebration with pancakes. Below are some of the photos from the day.

Digitisation Office

The digitization office had an exciting 2011 up to now.

First we started working on the Hans Merensky project.  This project contains the complete document collection of the late Dr. Merensky as well as some of his books that are in the public domain. Most of the letters are the second or third flimsy carbon copy of the letter which does have its own challenges regarding the digitization method and the physical handling and preservation of the paper.  Up to now we came across very interesting letters in the collection and our team regards Dr Merensky as one of the most remarkable and outstanding people living in South Africa.  Our library can be proud to be called the Merensky Library.  If you have a chance please have a look at the video clip that Magriet did for the University’s Centenary: The Merensky story available on UPSpace at http://hdl.handle.net/2263/7614

 

Left: Magriet and Heila

busy in the

Hans Merensky

Memorial Museum, Westfalia

Right: Dr Hans Merensky

Ria co-authored two chapters in a manual managed by the NRF and funded by the Carnegie Corporation “Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework” which can be obtained from the NRF.

Ria has also been chosen by the United States Department of State to take part in their International Visitor Leadership Program where she had the chance to visit many digitisation projects running in Washington DC, Maryland and Rhode Island.  She also attended the Computers in Libraries 2011 conference in Washington DC with the aim to learn more about eReaders and eTablets and developing apps (applications for the hardware).

In this photo: Ria with a sculpture by the actor Anthony Quinn  

The digi-team is also experimenting with eReaders and Tablets and would like your input.  You are invited to visit the digitisation office and have a firsthand experience of the Kindle, Samsung Galaxy, iPad and Blackberry Playbook tablets.  We will also blog about our own experience with the eReaders and tablets soon (http://uplsdigitisation.blogspot.com/ ) 

The digitisation office finished a very difficult project for Sabinet “South African Journal of Geology” under the leadership of Lidia Swart.  In the project we had to scan oversized, brittle maps and journals.  The project was finished earlier this year and is regarded as one of our major success stories. 

Lidia Swart is permanently employed at the UPLS from 1 May 2011; we want to welcome Lidia as we know that she will be one of our outstanding personnel members during her career as an “Accidental Librarian”. We also welcomed Maritz Visser and Phyllis Chueu to our team and unfortunately had to say farewell to Janine.

The Digi-team: Cindy-Lee du Plessis, Janine Loubser, Maritz Visser,Phyllis Chueu, Elliot Matukane
Right: Ria Groenewald and Lidia Swart

The first half of this year also had its own challenges with this office having to deal with the older (not in digital format) Dissertation and Theses that needed to be converted from analogue to digital format for submission to the UPeTD platform.  The team did an excellent job under much pressure.

Our office has been given a new facelift  by painting it with warm colours that also does not reflect light unto the scanners. Thanks to Salomie for arranging this.

The digi-team was responsible for keeping the dry-walls alive during the renovations of the library and did an excellent job with the directions and our own facebook “Wall of Thoughts”.

We also finished our first book from negative plates with a very satisfied client (Prof W Meyer) who will reprint the Strauss book for the use by his students.  We are still busy with the physical preservation project of the negative plates. Herewith a part of Prof Meyer’s email to the office:

“Baie, baie dankie vir die moeite en die goeie nuus. Ek het 'n maand gelede by die outeur gaan kuier en hy was baie dankbaar dat sy boekie vir die nageslag behoue sal bly. Tiene van duisende studente het die boekie gebruik, en ek hoop dat hy selfs in die toekoms nuttig sal wees.”

We unfortunately had to stop the Onderstepoort Journal project for the first half of the year because of a lack of funding for temporary help therewith.  Hopefully this valuable project will again take momentum during the second half of this year. 

The Digi-office was visited by many groups and individuals amongst which were visitors from various UP Faculties and Departments, WITS University, The Africa Institute, Department of Arts and Culture, Gibbs Library Personnel, M.IT Group, University of Botswana and University of Uganda.  We give training to the University of Ghana.  Please have a look at our Facebook  page http://www.facebook.com/pages/UPLS-Digitisation-Office/145308528847872  for a constant photo update of our latest projects.

Also of interest is Lidia’s insert in this Newsletter on the making of our own surrogate copy of the beautiful book on Dr. Livingstone’s life and explorations.

The Digi-team

The Road to Digitisation

The road to digitizing “The life and Explorations of Dr. Livingstone”:

Preface:

When the report of the death of Dr. Livingstone reached this country, many people refused to give it credit. He had so often been given up for lost and mourned as dead, his countrymen were reluctant to believe that the grand old man would never more be seen amongst them.  Ever since the indomitable Stanley took his last look of the great traveller – who, although for nearly six years he had been wholly cut off from civilisation, still lingered, self-exiled, until his work should be completed – the interest in his movements had not abated. From the Congo or from the Nile - according to the opinions formed as to the further course of the mysterious Lualaba, whose gathering waters he had followed from the uplands which divide the African central valley from that of the Zambezi, to a point within a couple of hundred miles of the hitherto supposed head waters of the Nile-intelligence of his movements had been looked for with an impatience which shows how strong an impression this remarkable man and his extraordinary career had made upon the public mind.  The life of this truly great man, from its childhood to its close, is a living lesson which the youth of our country cannot take too closely to heart.  The child and boy who, while undergoing the drudgery of twelve hours' daily labour in a factory, found time and means to educate himself for the noble office of a Christian Missionary to the heathen, is as interesting and instructive a study as that of the grown man, whose determined will and untiring effort have made us familiar with more of the formerly unknown, regions of the earth than any previous explorer of ancient or of modem times.  The present narrative-mainly designed for that large class of modern readers who have neither the time nor the opportunity for becoming acquainted with the many sources from which it has been gleaned-has been written and compiled with the view of giving 8 graphic account of a memorable life story, the full details of which are either shut up in books beyond the reach of the majority of readers, locked up in files of newspapers, or buried in the reports and journals of the Royal Geographical Society-these latter, a source totally inaccessible to the general reader.

The process of digitizing “The life and Explorations of Dr. Livingstone”:

The book was first scanned in 2009, with 664 pages to scan.  We started the derivating (down scaling and cleaning) process in 2010, and after about a week, the book was in the final PDF format, OCR’ed (text recognitioning) and optimized to an acceptable size for web access.

For marketing purposes, the Digi-office decided to make a surrogate copy (to a certain extend) of this book, as it has a beautiful front cover and some colour images.  We contacted Wet Ink Print and Design, and they gave us specifics as to the format we have to hand over the tiff images for printing.  Janine Loubser and Lidia Swart then started to scrutinize the book once again (664 pages and all!!) to make sure it is perfect, and Janine designed the front cover for the company that does the binding, as there were specific dimensions for the binding process.

Our office finally got the printed book back on the 22^nd of August 2011, and it really looks amazing!  The photos should also express the excitement, as we are proud of the work we did and happy when we see the results!

Opening the gift!

          old book                  new book

Spot the difference?

Digitised and edited by:

Elliot Matukane, Janine Loubser and Lidia Swart

Huisgenoot Project Interview

This is an interview between Phyllis Chueu and Lidia Swart on the Huisgenoot project

 

At the time of its publication, Huisgenoot magazine was regarded as a cultural magazine covering history, literature, biographies and art. People relied on magazines and newspapers as sources of information. Huisgenoot is currently indexed with the Index to South African Periodicals (ISP) but there is no online fulltext version available. This makes it hard for the public to access the publications because there are a lot of channels to follow to reach ISP. Digitising Huisgenoot publications and making them available on the University of Pretoria Institutional Repository will make them accessible to the public. The University of Pretoria Library Services regards Huisgenoot as a priority project due to the value of the content of the publications.

1. Phyllis: What is the project about?

Lidia: The project is about the Huisgenoot magazines, from the year 1916, to about 1980.

2. Phyllis: When did you start with it?

Lidia: The scanning of the magazines started end 2007, but the magazines need to be edited to a web-publishing format.

3. Phyllis: Who will be funding the project?

Lidia: At the moment the digitization office is looking at Media 24 to be the possible funders of the project, but it is still going to be negotiated.

4. Phyllis: What are the different phases in this project?

Lidia: First, all the magazines must be scanned.  Then a data list is made, where we keep statistics of the project, and each book.  The next step is the derivation of the scanned material, and the final step in our office is to then PDF the final images into an OCR’ed document.

5. Phyllis: What is the outcome that you are hoping for?

Lidia: We are hoping that Media 24 will agree to fund the project, so that it can be completed at the University of Pretoria in order for our institution to host the material on more than one platform, for instance, on the library institutional repository as well as on the Media 24 platform

6. Phyllis: Thank you for your time Lidia 

Lidia: It's a pleasure Phyllis 

Below is a link to the voice recording from the interview in mp3 format

Huisgenoot.mp3

A visit from Wits University

Yesterday, we had a visit from Wits Medical Campus in order to find out what it would take to start a digitisation project a well as how to sustain such a project. We showed them everything we do in the office, what projects we're working on as well as the workflow we follow.

Later the day, we got feedback from them, telling us how impressed they were with how we handled their visit and commended us on our professionalism.

Not always a walk in the park

The following image had to be scanned from a carbon copy of the the copy we had, since we didn't have the original. Since the copy we had the work with was already bad quality, it wasn't an easy task to digitise it into an acceptable version. A lot of work thus had to go into digitising this book into a high quality digital copy. Whoever said digitising was as easy as 1, 2, 3?

Painting the office

They say change is as good as a holiday, so after choosing a new colour scheme for the office, these were the results:
BEFORE

DURING

AFTER