Glen Arm, MD area circa WWI

Greetings and Happy New Year! 2010 was another great year for our company. Despite a bad recession, we managed to bring on new customers and continue delivering high-quality images to our ever-expanding customer base. Additionally, we announced a new microfilm scanning partnership with LYRASIS, the nation’s largest regional membership organization for libraries and information professionals.

We’ve also made significant investments in our growth and infrastructure, and plan on expanding our suite of services very soon. To that end, we are relocating our operations to Glen Arm, MD in the beautiful Long Green Valley Historic District, about 15 minutes from our current location in Towson.

Effective February 1, 2011, our new address will be:

Creekside Digital
5200 Glen Arm Road
Suite Q
Glen Arm, MD 21057

With triple the square footage of our current location, our main imaging studio will now be housed in a fireproof concrete vault which ironically once functioned as a corporate archives facility. This will allow us to stay focused on our mission of providing the highest quality images available anywhere, at any price.

Please contact us should you be planning to send materials to us before February 1.

Also, if you haven’t already — please visit our Facebook Page. It contains up-to-the-minute happenings around the shop, news and announcements, and links to related articles which may be of interest to our customers, partners, and friends. It’s updated a lot more frequently than this blog, so you may want to “Like It” to keep tabs on us.

Have a great 2011!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

Indianapolis Recorder, February 7, 1931 (used with permission -- click for searchable PDF)

We are pleased to announce that Creekside Digital’s partnership with LYRASIS, the nation’s largest regional membership organization for libraries, has been expanded in two key ways:

• Books on microfilm are now eligible for the Sloan-subsidized pricing under the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative; and
• Digitized newspapers may now be optionally segmented (organized) by year, month, or date (issue).

Specifically regarding books on microfilm: all 2-up frames are split into two separate output pages. Page images are cropped to the page edge and deskewed. Additionally, in cases where it would improve image quality, Creekside Digital will apply geometric curve correction to remove any page curvature present on the imaged pages, which usually results in improved OCR accuracy. As with our LYRASIS newspaper conversions, all books-on-microfilm projects yield four files per output page: an uncompressed archival TIFF master, a JPEG2000 derivative, a downscaled searchable PDF reader, and a plain text file of the OCR engine’s raw output. These services are all included in the Sloan-subsidized pricing for digitization of books on microfilm that’s available to all LYRASIS members for one low per-page price. Yes — it’s quite a deal.

In the last month, we have digitized student newspapers on microfilm for Clarion University (PA) and Presbyterian College (SC). We are currently wrapping up the digitization of 39 rolls of microfilm of the Duquesne Duke student weekly newspaper for Duquesne University (PA). All of these projects were digitized to Library of Congress’ NDNP imaging specs, and the Duquesne project is the first under our agreement with LYRASIS to feature issue segmentation, with the reader PDFs from each issue being combined into a single multipage file named according to the issue’s date.

John Coffer, modern wet-plate collodion photographer

As always, for questions regarding pricing, logistics, etc., please contact Laurie Gemmill, Mass Digitization Program Manager for LYRASIS, at 800-233-3401 x2908, or email her at laurie.gemmill@lyrasis.org.

Also, for an interesting distraction, take a look at John Coffer’s website. John is a decidely retro photographer in the Finger Lakes area of New York. He lives without electricity, Internet access, or even running water, and has traveled across America in a horse-drawn darkroom / wagon performing his wet-plate collodion photography. Currently, he’s hosting three-day workshops on his farm (teepees included!) where students from all over the world camp out and receive hands-on training to help keep the “lost art” of wet-plate collodion photography alive.

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.

Greetings!

The Baltimore Metro Area hit a new record temperature for today’s date with a high of 105 degrees. Yes — it was miserable, and we’re all hiding in the air conditioning. No break in sight, either. But just five months ago, we literally had five feet of snow piled up in the parking lot!

As I previously mentioned, we’ve had many smaller projects going in and out of the shop. As an example, this morning we scanned a 46 year-old yearbook to searchable PDF for an individual customer in New Jersey, and also processed a small historic microfilm project for a municipal customer in New Hampshire. Both jobs came out very well. The CopiBook HD 600 is *exceedingly* sharp edge-to-edge, and it really shows. Those of you considering doing work yourselves on a $99 Best Buy flatbed scanner versus sending it to us would be shocked at the difference — it is literally apples and oranges. I hope to have some hi-res samples available on the site soon to really demonstrate the machine’s capabilities. But if you want sharp, accurate images, you will be hard-pressed to beat our CopiBook HD 600.

At the ALA show, I saw the Austrian Treventus book scanning robot being marketed here in the US by Indus. Interesting concept — pros and cons to its approach. It uses two CCD sensors embedded in its “splitting wedge”and actually line-scans both sides of each page simultaneously. It probably does the best job of eliminating page curvature of any robot out there, but it’s capped at 300dpi true optical resolution, so it won’t work for true preservation-quality work. Its maximum page size is also limited, and the price tag is a bit high (as with all robots). But it seems this unit would be a monster for rapid digitization of general circulation stacks, for example.

Case studies will be up on this site soon — Santa Paula Historical Society, and John Rigby & Co., Inc., with others to follow.

– Jim

Yesterday, we “flipped the switch” on our new website. The old homegrown site had served us well throughout the first part of our company’s existence, but we have aggressively grown over the past year and required something which better described our new capabilities to current and potential customers. Kudos to Cloud Nine Labs for working with us to build exactly what we wanted.

We’ve had lots of different kinds of projects going in and out of the shop lately, the largest of which is a 137 roll newspaper conversion including NDNP-specification scanning. This means uncompressed 8-bit TIFF Master files between 300-400dpi (depending on the reduction ratio of the film), which gives us really huge images — 30 to 60 MB each. Then of course, there are several other derivatives, but none are nearly as large as the TIFFs. We conservatively estimate that the final project will consume approximately 5.5 TB of disk space.

Also, Creekside Digital will be attending the American Library Association 2010 Annual Conference this weekend in nearby Washington DC. We look forward to seeing old friends and making some new ones there!

Frontispiece from a recent project scanned at 400dpi (click for detail)

It’s been awhile since our last update to the blog. We’ve been heads-down with a lot of important digitization projects lately. About a month ago, we performed onsite scanning on a large job for a legal services company here in the Northeast. Currently, we have two large jobs in the shop. One is a 461 roll conversion of 16mm microfilm for a large utility customer in the Western US. This job includes Creekside Digital’s ultra high-quality film scanning, OCR, and PDF compression. At the same time, we’re running a 134 roll 35mm microfilmed newspaper project for a library system (also out west), which includes scanning, OCR, and creation of FullText indices to allow the library’s staff and patrons to keyword search all 134 rolls of film simultaneously. In between, of course, we’ve been running a variety of small jobs for folks all over the US and Canada: single rolls for individuals; orders which are a handful of rolls for engineering firms, hospitals, and churches; and plenty of fiche jobs for parts suppliers, school districts, and litigation service companies.

Very soon, microfiche orders will be accepted through our Small Order Form as well as rollfilm. That means that if you have a small number of sheets / jackets of microfiche (up to 1,000), you’ll be able to simply fill out the form in your browser, entering the number of sheets you have and the type of processing you need (PDF or JPG, OCR, etc.). The form will automatically calculate the exact price for you (including shipping!), and you’ll print it out and mail it to us with you fiche. We’ll process your order and send your fiche back along with a DVD of your digitized fiche images. We expect to have microfiche digitization available through the Small Order Form within the next few weeks.

Have a great 4th of July!

– Jim and the folks at Creekside Digital