The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has had extensive experience with
raster scanning of printed materials. Since 1987, the Library has
participated in the National Agricultural Text Digitizing Project (NATDP)
a cooperative effort between NAL and forty-five land grant university
libraries. An overview of the project will be presented, giving its
history and NAL's strategy for the future.
An in-depth discussion of NATDP will follow, including a description of
the scanning process, from the gathering of the printed materials to the
archiving of the electronic pages. The type of equipment required for a
stand-alone scanning workstation and the importance of file management
software will be discussed. Issues concerning the images themselves will
be addressed briefly, such as image format; black and white versus color;
gray scale versus dithering; and resolution.
Also described will be a study currently in progress by NAL to evaluate
the usefulness of converting microfilm to electronic images in order to
improve access. With the cooperation of Tuskegee University, NAL has
selected three reels of microfilm from a collection of sixty-seven reels
containing the papers, letters, and drawings of George Washington Carver.
The three reels were converted into 3,500 electronic images using a
specialized microfilm scanner. The selection, filming, and indexing of
this material will be discussed.