[DCRM-L] RBMS Thesauri digitization

[Beth Russell]

As editor of the RBMS thesauri, I appreciate the interest folks have shown 
in our digitization efforts. It's really encouraging to know people are 
anxious to have these tools available and that the product will actually 
get some use! I thought I'd just take this chance to bring everyone in the 
DCRM community up to date on where we stand.

We have had permission from ACRL to digitize these volumes for several 
years. We simply wanted to make a product available that was better than 
the print volumes, rather than recreating the problems of dynamic thesauri 
struggling to live in a fixed form.

We did, in fact, consider making PDFs of the text available. The problem 
we've found in digitization projects of e-texts at many of our institutions 
is that in order to be easily useable, the texts need to be broken up 
through mark-up or through the creation of separate files (such as sections 
for A, B, C,  etc.) Otherwise, the documents will be very large and take a 
while (depending on the connection) to access, and they be very difficult 
to navigate. The temptation would be to print out the document once, which 
adds to, rather than corrects, the problem of people consulting only the 
print version and not keeping up to date with changes and additions. The 
time spent on such markup seemed to us better spent on moving the data into 
a database format that would be both web-accessible and easily updated by 
the thesaurus team.

File storage was another problem that we would have encountered even with 
PDFs. Our institutions are (understandably) reluctant to host such files 
that have no direct relation to the institution, and moving files from one 
institution to another as the membership of the group changes has proven to 
be confusing hassle for everyone. At the same time, the ALA server does not 
appear to offer the flexibility we need to manage files in a shared 
environment. (Which is why, for example, the RBMS site itself doesn't live 
there.)

We are moving forward with both the issue of an interface for the database 
and file storage solutions, and have made great progress over the past 
year. Many members of BSC have already provided comments on a "beta" 
version of the thesauri. We are not able to share it more widely at this 
time since it is a proprietary product.

If anyone has questions about the progress of this project, I'd be happy to 
try to address them. I believe we will also be discussing this at the BSC 
meeting in Chicago.

Beth Russell, Thesaurus Editor
----------------------
Beth M. Russell
Assistant Professor
Head, Special Collections Cataloging
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus OH 43210-1286
614-247-7463
FAX 614-292-2015
russell.363 at osu.edu
----------------------