A pdf by any other name
There is now a printer/copier/scanner in the Special Collections department and Digital Collections has seen a dramatic drop in the number of “ad hoc” digitization requests that we do. These days we are pretty much only called in when the digitization is for publication purposes or when the format is unusual in some way (large, fragile, negatives, etc.). Most other scans are done on this multifunction device as pdfs.
On the one hand, this is good. We’ve completed a number of larger projects this year and our student workers can really focus on projects involving similar formats and workflows, increasing efficiency. However, now the tide has turned and several members of the Special Collections department are asking to have the pdfs “attached” to the finding aid (which, to us means, deposit it in the repository, create metadata, store for the long-term with the best methods possible…because the whole point is to organize all this digital ephemera not just have it “attached” to the finding aid).
So now I have the proverbial Angel on one shoulder and Devil on the other:
Angel: Access to something is better than nothing!
Devil: But pdfs of photographs and manuscripts? Ew.
A: They are perfectly readable online, i.e. access ready
D: But we don’t have a built in pdf viewer…yet…
A: We have asked, and gotten, identifiers, titles, and descriptions which is all we ask for to begin a digitization request anyway
D: But should we spend so much time on improving the metadata (which we will eventually do, if we follow the current workflow) of pdfs?
A: They are already just sitting around on servers, why not use them?
D: But if we deposit them, think of all the overhead involved? Would we be committing to digital preservation?
A: Aren’t you just being a snob?
D: No, I’m being a good steward of resources!
So I leave it to you, collaborators, what would you do?
Posted by Gretchen at June 16th, 2010 under ECU, digital preservation, digitization.
Comments
Comment from Audra
Time June 21, 2010 at 4:10 pm
I agree with Amy. It seems like a natural progression to use what you’ve got in order for researchers to gain access to the resources, albeit non-preservation format. For me, it goes in the same category as whether or not we should post finding aids to unprocessed collections (I say yes). There’s maximum effort for some access, and then there’s minimal effort for greater access.
Comment from Gretchen
Time June 23, 2010 at 7:50 am
I see both your points, I guess what rankles me (and just to play Devil’s Advocate) is that we will spend a considerable amount of overhead: (creating derivatives, cataloging, storing on preservation server, creating technical/preservation metadata) on these things. While the access part is great, what I fear is that we do all that work and then next week someone wants one of these for a publication and then we have to rescan, re-do the technical/preservation metadata, find the old file on the preservation server and replace, re-do the derivatives…
Also, these are piecemeal “bits” of larger wholes, so what happens when we decide to scan the whole collection: what do I do with the item-level metadata I created for this pdf version — just throw it away? duplicate access to both old and new version? integrate somehow?? I guess my point is that I want to favor access over “perfection” but where is the line where it is just a bad use of resources? Right now it’s just six files, but will this lead to more and more of this? I guess after 2 1/2 years of ingesting “ad hoc” digitization requests into our repository, I’m seeing some of the cracks in the system is all…
I think in the end I’ll probably decide to use them, but lately I’ve been trying to guess with every decision whether or not I’ll regret it later! 
Comment from Amy
Time July 2, 2010 at 9:46 am
Gretchen: sounds like it is time to get Michael to write an on-the-fly [filefomat]-to-PDF transformer.
Oh, and then share it with the rest of us. 
Comment from Amy Rudersdorf
Time June 21, 2010 at 7:43 am
We’ve found that many of our older users (many of our users are older) are much, much more comfortable using PDF than any other file format. They often request that we send them our scans-on-demand in PDF. While it isn’t our preservation format, we’re giving the people what they want. And, isn’t that the point?