Digitalisation, Distant Access and Collaborative Work With a Collection of 16^th Century Books. The DEBORA Project

Richard Bouche, Hubert Emptoz, Salah Dalhoumi
DEBORA group

DEBORA (Digital accEss to BOoks of the RenAissance) is European Union program in library domain (N° LB-5608/A°°. The project aim is design a complete digitalisation line for 16° century books with distant access to the collection by the mean of the Internet. The main client terminal functionalities are distant access, retrieval of a part of a book, and collaborative work. DEBORA design consists of existing tools integration in a complete carrying out. So, a first prototype can be built and evaluated by users groups. Users remarks are taken into account in a final demonstrator. Needs and usability analysis are an important part of the project. With DEBORA, two other aspects are interesting : image processing with an aim of indexing and cost analysis of digitalisation line.

The three libraries members of DEBORA with their 16° century collections are :

1. Casanatense library in Rome (Italy),
2. Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal),
3. Public library of LYON (France)

About 100 books will be digitised, that is to say about 25 000 pages.

Three libraries will be test sites. (Geneva, Zaragoza and Munchen).

Seven laboratories in Lancaster (United Kingdom), Lisboa (Portugal) and Lyon (France) specialised in collaborative work, image processing and document description are in the consortium.

DEBORA is now in the middle part of the project. The aim of this communication is to present the obtained results concerning three main points :

1. The important participation of users in the first prototype design . The results of a first usability analysis had an important role in users groups definition and the choice of books to be digitised.
2. Digitalisation is made in image mode. Digitalisation quality, definition of compression algorithm, images storage and data base structure are presented.
3. The use of four levels of metadata to describe a part of a book or a part of page, page indexing by the mean of image processing, access mode and collaborative work are also presented.

A demonstration of DEBORA may be presented by the way of a distant access to a base located in Lyon.