Project Information

Credits

Between the conception of this project in 1998, and its launch in 2001, several Northwestern University Library (NUL) departments worked together to digitize and make accessible through the Internet select League of Nations publications. This project is a result of the vision and hard work of various staff members of the following NUL departments:

Catalog Department
Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department
Library Management Systems Department
Preservation Department
Serials Department

For assistance with this digital collection or other League of Nations Collection help, please visit the Government Publications & Maps Department or contact staff at 1-847-491-3130 or govinfo@northwestern.edu.

Project History and Technical Information

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a National Leadership Grant for Digitization to Northwestern University Library in 1998. IMLS grants are awarded to research libraries and museums to develop creative solutions for building digital libraries. The grant allowed the Library to provide access to materials in which there is global interest and to preserve the collection in electronic and print formats. Northwestern University Library hopes that other institutions may digitize League publications. The Government Publications Department would support a cooperative endeavor by serving as a clearinghouse for League digitization projects.

Scanning

Preservation Department and Library Management Systems staff emphasized the presentation of the facsimile image of the original documents, to preserve the context and work within limits of OCR conversion for historical documents. The PDF "image plus text" format supplies page images with invisible text below from the OCR engine. This background OCR enables some text searching within each document. The OCR text is not marked-up or edited for separate presentation or data manipulation.

Vendor: NMT Corp. (formerly Northern Micrographics), LaCrosse, Wisconsin

Production dates: Fall 1999 -- Spring 2000

Archival images: bitonal TIFF images at 600 dpi resolution, group IV compression

Web format: PDF "image plus text" mode (background OCR)

Access

Northwestern University Library staff provided a guide to League of Nations publications, a documents database, and text searching within the documents to support the use of the material by a wide community.

Catalogers created MARC records for the hard-copy reprints generated from the scans. These records have been uploaded to Northwestern's online catalog (NUcat) and the OCLC library database.

Library Management Systems and Preservation Department staff exported data from the MARC records to a web-accessed SGML database.

Preservation Department staff indexed chapter headings for the Armaments Yearbook, Statistical Yearbook, and Statistical Yearbook of the Trade in Arms, Ammunition and Implements of War. The documents database retrieves individual PDF files per chapter.

Preservation and the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department staff created a web page of HTML links to the PDF files of the Statistical Yearbook, which they expect to be the most popular of the digitized titles.

To avoid problems caused by downloading large files, Preservation Department staff separated all documents with more than 40 pages into PDF documents of fewer pages. These PDF files are retrievable through the database.