Volume 30, Issue 4

Introduction After generating numerous unanswered questions about its microfilm masters, their history, and their condition, the collection assessment became the most realistic process by which the University of Kentucky could better understand its holdings. In May 2001, the University of Kentucky's Preservation Reformatting Librarian began the process of designing and implementing a collection assessment for the University's holdings of first-generation microfilm masters.

Imagine having at your desktop page images of books printed in English from the dawn of British hand-printing in 1475 through the English Renaissance, the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration to 1700. Picture yourself typing in a keyword such as an author's or printer's name and having the entire work, be it a one page broadside or a thousand page Bible, appear on the screen and be available to read or print. This project, perhaps the most ambitious microfilm-to-digital conversion attempted thus far, digitized over 22 million page images from ProQuest Information and Learning's Early English Books I & II and Thomason Tracts microfilm Research Collections, bringing scholars unparalleled access to this valued content. The goal of this project is to provide scholars with a single source for research on works printed between 1475–1700, including bibliographic citations, full-page images and ASCII-encoded text. This paper details the development of the production requirements and technical specifications for the project and reviews the large-scale digitization process installed to convert the microfilm images. The key role of university and library partnerships will also be reviewed.

The Library of Congress recently digitized about 6,500 documents from its holdings of The Samuel F. B. Morse Papers . The online exhibit of about 50,000 images “document Morse's invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, his participation in the development of telegraph systems in the United States and abroad, his career as a painter, his family life, his travels, and his interest in early photography, religion, and the nativist movement … The papers included date from 1793 to 1919, but most are from 1807 to 1872.”