QA Summit
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Quality Assurance Summit
18-19 June 2009
New York Botanical Garden Library
Invitation:
There will be a general quality assurance (QA) meeting in New York City at the New York Botanical Garden on June 18-19, 2009. This meeting will be for those working directly with Internet Archive scanning facilities in Washington, Boston and New Jersey to come together to discuss how best to standardize BHL QA procedures with those used by the Internet Archive so as to achieve the best results. Rejection criteria, special BHL handling and other topics will be covered so that BHL can speak with one voice to our Internet Archive partners. The BHL will cover reasonable travel, accommodation and per diem costs for this meeting. You will receive a follow up message from Kathleen Hill at the Smithsonian to assit you with arranging your travel. I will be on travel to Europe, please direct any technical questions about the meeting to Martin Kalfatovic. Thank you for your participation, Tom Garnett
Robert Document:
http://www.archive.org/details/IaSpecForBookDigitization
Some
photos are now up.
When:
Where:
- New York Botanical Garden Library
Why:
- BHL partner libraries are not doing QA on their Internet Archive scanned materials, or if they are, each partner is doing it differently. To provide the IA with the best feedback and to also maximize and standardize how BHL partners should do QA (when time and resources permit). Proposed outcomes include:
- Standard set of QA procedures
- How to handle general QA
- How to handle QA of materials for which BHL has permission from publishers (e.g. should this get "special priority")
- Standardize acceptable "mistakes" ie, do we care about advertisements, etc, and other non-"meat" occurrences within the text?
- How much of what kind of text is ok to evade capture by scribe?
- [add more here!]
Logistical Details
- Train schedules for Metro North's Harlem line can be found at http://as0.mta.info/mnr/schedules/sched_form.cfm
- Trains leave from Grand Central Station. Not all Metro-North trains stop at the Garden, so be careful when consulting the schedules. Blue line trains (to North White Plains) generally stop at the Garden and run about every hour or so. The Botanical Garden station is directly across from the Garden entrance.
- It is also possible to travel between the Garden and Manhattan on the 4 (Green Line : East Side) or D (Orange Line : West Side) subway line; the subway runs more frequently than Metro-North. However, it is a long walk from the Garden grounds to the subway station (about 15-20 minutes). See map : http://tinyurl.com/nn5uc5 Subway map here : http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/submap.htm . The stop for the Garden from Manhattan is Bedford Park Blvd. Let us know if you need directions to the stop.
- The meeting will be held in the Reading Room on the 6th floor of the Library building. At the Garden Metro-North stop, walk through the parking lot and cross Kazimiroff Blvd to the Mosholu Gate entrance to the Garden. Tell Security you are there for the BHL QA Meeting and go to the left to the Library building. Use the main entrance and take the elevator to the 6th floor. Follow the signs to the Library entrance.
- If anyone is planning on driving to the Garden, we need to know in order to let Security know you are coming. Enter the Garden via the Mosholu Gate entrance on Kazimiroff Blvd. and park along the drive running alongside the Library building.
- Wireless access is available in the Reading Room. Since part of the meeting will be a group QA exercise, you should bring a wi-fi enabled laptop if possible.
- Thursday evening we are planning on going as a group to “little Italy” on Arthur Avenue nearby for dinner.. Susan Fraser and John Mignault will drive people to dinner. In order to get an idea of the number of cars we will need please let us know if you are planning on joining the group. After dinner we can drop people off at the Fordham Metro-North station, which is convenient for trains to either Manhattan or Westchester.
- Friday we will provide lunch for the group at the Garden Cafe. Please let John Mignault know any dietary preferences (vegetarian, kosher, etc) by Monday, June 15th.
- If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact John Mignault.
Accommodations:
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Agenda:
- June 18 (Thursday): Get the Facts and Discover Problems
- 2:00 pm: Meet and Greet (this will give people time to get there)
- 2:30 pm. Start Meeting: 30 minute Robert Miller phone call to discuss high level policy, procedures, and expectations for QA from IA's point of view...
- 3:00 pm. Begin discussion of current QA policy and procedures, problems, concerns as each group understands it in connection with their own scanning center.
- 4:30 - 5:00: Recap/Action Items/Goals for Friday
- 5:00 pm: End - Plan and revise schedule for Friday as/if needed.
- Dinner: on your own or go in a big group (see Little Italy, Arthur Avenue, above)
- June 19 (Friday): Decisions, Revisions, and More Decisions
- 9:00 am: Review/complete Thursday discussions as/if needed.
- 9:00 am+ :Practice makes perfect! Group QA for a statistical sample of a shipment (one will be onsite, ready for QA?) implementing decisions made previous afternoon.
- Discuss and develop a uniform policy and procedure for performing QA, with an emphasis on coming to an agreement regarding gaps and inconsistencies in policy including reject criteria, fail cart policy, send-back procedure, statistical sampling, "special priority" items, communications with IA, how to flag rescans for IA, which method to use for QAing (PDF, flip book, etc., and inconsistencies between these formats...)
- foldouts - what is our criteria for these and what conditions must be met in order for us to reject them?,
-out of order plates and text: example , also covers.
-dedication pages, advertisements, etc.
-how to deal with scenario where quality of original volume is compromised, ie: text of even pages of a volume is lighter than odd pages- visual undulation of text and other anomolies - should we expect IA to resolve, or is it our problem?
-down the road 2,3 + years, when a scanning error is discovered will we be able to resolve with IA?
-where do you place visual inspection relative to: whether text OCR's correctly - in making an accept/reject of a scanned volume decision?
-what is our position on tissue scanned over pages that inhibits correct OCR reading?
-can we request to have an incorrectly oriented foldout rotated to correct orientation?;
-does it matter to us that the shading of scanned foldouts is often different than the scanned text? - QA for ingested material - how should we handle this?
- 12:30pm Lunch break, Garden Cafe
- 1:30 pm Questions? Comments? Ideas? - Have we fulfilled "proposed outcomes" above?
- 4:00 - 4:30 pm: Recap/Actions Items/Goals Accomplished
- 4:30 pm: Summary and Farewells!
ADD TO AGENDA
- Gut vs Dark
- Special favors you get from the scanning center
Attendees:
AMNH
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Harvard/MCZ
MBLWHOI
- Diane Rielinger
- Matt Person
NY Botanical Garden
- John Mignault
- Kevin Nolan
- Don Wheeler
Smithsonian:
- Grace Duke
- Erin Thomas
- Keri Thompson
