Digital Documentation Center
Digitizing

UNDER DEVELOPMENT

  • General

    In-house digitizing and Out-sourcing

    Due to the limited amount of time and hardware, some digitizing has to be outsourced. Scanning A0 sized maps is impractical on flatbed, legal size scanner, so this is done at the local stationary. Also, as we don't have a Kodak slide scanner with which to make PhotoCDs, we send our films to be developed, scanned and put on PhotoCDs, which saves us the time and hassle of having to do it ourselves.
    However, the rest of the work, including slide and film scanning, text and image scanning, sound and video recording is done in-house

  • Recording methods

    Photographs and other images


    Audio

    • What you basically need to record sound is a sound card and an appropriate software.
      The technique used is to :
      1. Record the sound in the aiff format and adjust it ( CoolEdit 96 under Windows 95).
      2. Convert it to a real audio file (SoundEdit 16 on the Power Mac).

    Video

    Text

    • English text
      1. Do an OCR scan using the HP scanjet 4c and the Omnipage Professional Software on the Power Mac
      2. Save the ouptput as text
      3. Add the html tags using emacs

    • Arabic text
      1. Edit the text in wordpad on windows 95 or in Nisus on the Mac
      2. Print the file and direct its output to a postcript file
      3. Convert the postscript file into a PDF file using Adobe Distiller program
      4. Take a screen shot, paste it into Adobe Photoshop and save it as a JPEG image

    Objects

    Physical environments

  • Equipments

    Computers

    Server :
    • HP i586 machine, Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB of RAM running Linux 2.0.31
      The web server Apache version 1.1 is installed in /var/lib/httpd directory. The html documents are in /disk2/htdocs.
      It is acting as the server for both ddc.aub.edu.lb and almashriq.aub.edu.lb

    PCs :
    • Two Gateways 2000, Pentium 200 Mhz, 64 MB of RAM running Windows NT workstation
    • One Austin PC, Pentium 100 Mhz, 16 MB of RAM running Windows 95 with arabic support
    • One Power Macintosh, PowerPC 604 150 Mhz, 64 MB of RAM running MacOS version 8.0 with arabic system
    • One Macintosh IIvi running MacOS version 7.5 (mostly used for printing)

    Scanners

    • HP ScanJet 4C
    • Polaroid SprintScan 35 LE : this slide scanner gave bad resolution images, the borrowed slide scanners, a standard Polaroid Sprint Scan 35 and a Nikon 35 film scanner LS-1000, were used instead.

    Photographic equipment

    • Sony video camera Hi8
    • Two Photo Lamps 1000 watts - LX 901GZ
    • Panasonic DX1, Digital Video Camera (Borrowed)
    • Nikon F2 with a 55 mm micronikkor lens (Borrowed) : this camera is used for the photography of flat objects like posters, maps ...
      For the panoramas taken around the campus, a camera with a more wide angle lens is preferable.

    Audio equipment

    • TEAC W-800R Double Cassette Deck (Borrowed from Physical Plant)

    Other

    • Magnetic Board
      Used to attach posters to be photographed
    • TurnTable
      Constructed by the Physical Plant Department
    • Apple Personal Laser Writer NT


Created by the Documentation Center at AUB in collaboration with Al Mashriq of Høgskolen i Østfold, Norway.
 970805/bl - Email: ddc-info@aub.edu.lb