UCE Birmingham (University of Central England in Birmingham, UK
The UCE Birmingham (www.uce.ac.uk) is a mid sized university in Birmingham, UK. A Digital Library was established in 2000 and includes a state of the art unit for digitisation. We priamrily manage a digital library (called UCEEL) online repository for the university and are integrated within the Library & Learning Resources Dep't. We have undertaken many external projects digitising special collections and archives (e.g. work for the Imperial War Museum, LSE, The Royal Society London). We feel we are a specialist centre in the digitisation of analogue - paper based material into high quality digital surrogates for preservation purposes as well as access. The Zeutschel scaners (includign a unique OS9000 A1 full colour scanner) can produce high quality up to 800 true optical DPI) images at 36 bit depth (in fact up to 42 bit). We have digitised manuscripts ad fragiel bound material dating back to the 15th century up to and including more modern material boudn and unbound, paper and images e.g. maps including original 1812 2 metre plus length rolled maps of central London for the Royal Estate (on loan from the Public Record Office at Kew). We have also digitised bound volume (18th century) material for the Rothschild Archive at Waddesdon Manor, Oxfordshire. We are the main sub-contractor for digitising bound volume and large format material for HEDS (HIgher Education Digitisation Service, based at Hertforshire University) for preservation purposes. This occurs when their clients prefer a high quality digital surrogate for master/preservation purposes rather than a lower quality digital scan from a microfilm copy. Microfilm is still popular in the UK as the main surrogate preservation format. Aside from external clients, we do external contracts and also internal work, including digital preservation of student and staff work and dissertations/theses. We also stream copyright cleared digital video and audio materials to students. We have digitised a number of special collections using high quality Zuetschel scanners from Germany for both preservation and access purposes. We have recently purchased and installed the only A0 sized (largest) Zuetschel scanner in the UK (OS10,000A0 Model). Total value of this scanner alone is around 160,000 Euros (about £100,000)with 3 year warranties. We have special 9mm and 16mm scanners also for film and slide scanning. DIgital video and audio conversion is not a service we offer to external clients - this aspect of our work is just for the digital library (UCEEL).
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