Open apinkney0696 opened 8 months ago
This is super helpful, thanks @apinkney0696 !
To be clear, if we have the high-quality PDFs from which the books were printed -- there's probably no reason to spend time photographing the printed books, we can get what we need from the PDFs instead!
So the existence of the digitzation queue item probably shouldn't be taken to mean we are intending someone to photograph all hte pages! (Maybe the two inserts, if we don't have digital originals for them anymore?)
We can instead spend time looking at the various PDFs and merged files etc, analyzing what's there, and create new merged files if needed, etc.
That sounds right to me. And yes, agree, but if you look at the queue item details it's pretty clear that it's just a placeholder from which to make the records.
And also to be clear for the record of this ticket -- we will need to do some UI/feature work to make PDFs other than Oral Histories representable in a useful way in Digital Collections! It shouldn't be too hard, I think we have the pieces in place, but will need to assemble them in a new way.
Here is the background information on the Neville Catalog PDFs:
The Neville Catalog project was completed before Jim started. The highest-quality PDF files of the catalog are located here:
P:\Othmer Library\Neville Collection\1Neville Catalog, Vol. 1 P:\Othmer Library\Neville Collection\2Neville Catalog, Vol.2
These are the files that were used to create the print books. There are several PDF files that make up each Volume. There are merged versions of the Volumes floating around the P drive (P:\Othmer Library\Neville Collection, Neville Vol 1 Combined.pdf or Neville Vol 2 Combined.pdf). I assume that ingesting the merged files to the DC will be easier, but I don't know how much file quality was lost in their merge.
In the physical books, there are two inserts with color images. These inserts are not in the PDFs. Jim doesn't feel strongly about making sure these are included in the DC, so I think noting their existence in the print copies in the metadata is a sufficient way to handle their absence.
I've created a Digitization Queue item for the Volumes here: https://digital.sciencehistory.org/admin/digitization_queue_items/1135