Today, LYRASIS, the United States’ largest regional membership organization serving libraries and information professionals, announced that Creekside Digital is now providing preservation-quality microfilm scanning services to LYRASIS members through the Mass Digitization Collaborative. Here is the text of the press release (official press release on the LYRASIS site here):

LYRASIS Partners with Creekside Digital to Offer Expanded Microfilm Scanning Services

Atlanta, GA, — July 15, 2010 — LYRASIS partners with Creekside Digital, specialists in document digitization, to address members’ needs for expanded microfilm scanning services.

LYRASIS’ Mass Digitization Collaborative enables members to digitize books, serials, and newspapers for a low fee. Initially, the focus of the Collaborative was providing book scanning options. Now, in response to increased requests for scanning newspapers and books on microfilm, LYRASIS is broadening its focus and digital partnerships to afford members extended microfilm scanning services, in addition to optional encoding services. “We are thrilled by the opportunity to offer our preservation-quality microfilm scanning services to LYRASIS members through the Mass Digitization Collaborative,” said Jim Studnicki, President, Creekside Digital.

“While we will continue to leverage the expertise of The Internet Archive for book scanning, our partnership with Creekside Digital enables us to provide affordable, high-quality microfilm scanning and related text encoding services that follow relevant standards, such as the National Digital Newspaper Program guidelines,” commented Robin Dale, Director of Digital & Preservation Services.

LYRASIS member, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) participated in a pilot project to ensure member satisfaction with Creekside Digital’s conversion services. “We are working with Creekside Digital to digitize a collection of microfilmed Indianapolis newspapers. The project is not yet complete, but thus far their services have far exceeded our expectations, when it comes to communication and quality of work. We have received samples of the microfilm and we are satisfied with the results. Creekside Digital has gone above and beyond to address our questions about microfilming and the digitization process,” said Jenny Johnson, Digital Initiatives Project Coordinator, IUPUI University Library.

About Creekside Digital

Founded in 2006, Creekside Digital specializes in providing archival-quality digitization of microfilm as well as bound and oversized books, newspapers, and documents and manuscripts. For more information, please visit www.creeksidedigital.com.

About LYRASIS

Created in April 2009 by the merger of PALINET and SOLINET and joined shortly thereafter by NELINET, LYRASIS is the nation’s largest regional membership organization serving libraries and information professionals – providing opportunities for networking and collaboration, offering innovative solutions, and significant cost savings through group purchasing for products and services. For more information, please visit www.lyrasis.org.

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Creekside’s Take on the Announcement

This partnership represents a fabulous opportunity for LYRASIS members (and for those institutions contemplating joining LYRASIS or renewing their membership) to get truly top-drawer, archival microfilm digitization at a very reasonable price. How is this possible? For those who don’t know, the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative is a program made possible by a $1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This funding is used to subsidize the cost of the digitization for member institutions. There are essentially two requirements to take advantage of the subsidized pricing:

• An institution must be a LYRASIS member; and
• All images digitized via the Mass Digitization Collaboration must be made freely available online, either through the Internet Archive or a similar website.

Various options are available for LYRASIS members, up to and including full National Digital Newspaper Program-specification scanning including METS / ALTO structural XML metadata. At a minimum, all projects digitized by Creekside Digital through the Mass Digitzation Collaborative will include:

• 300-400dpi true optical resolution 8-bit uncompressed TIFF Digital Master file
• JPEG2000 derivative
• Searchable PDF derivative (“reader” files downscaled to 150dpi at Medium quality)
• “Sidecar” plain text versions of each image’s OCR data (required for loading images into searchable databases or content management systems such as CONTENTdm).

For questions regarding pricing, project procedures, LYRASIS membership, the Mass Digitization Collaborative, etc., please contact Laurie Gemmill, Mass Digitization Program Manager for LYRASIS, at 800-233-3401 x2908, or email her at laurie.gemmill@lyrasis.org.

For questions of a more technical nature regarding the microfilm digitization process, please contact Creekside Digital.