Elena Okhezina, Chief Librarian, Scientific Library of the Ural State University, (3432) 55-75-65, Elena.okhezina@usu.ru

Abstracts:

Since the beginning of 2001 Ural State University started the creation of a digital collection of rare books of the Scientific Library funds. The analysis of the existing Russian projects has not prompted a solution, which could become the prototype for our collection. Therefore principles of its creation and organisations, technological processes and instructions were developed.

The digital collection of the Scientific Library of the Ural State University provides access to book pages scanned with high quality (300 dpi is standard). All images are in DjVu format. This format provides:

high quality of digital copies;
small size of digital copies (no more than 10 Kb for standard page in black-and-white mode);
access via Internet (DjVu web browser plugin required).

In July 2001 the collection had about 8 thousands pages. Average speed of accumulation — about 1 thousand pages per month.

The digital collection consists of the most claimed in our library books published in 19th — the beginning of 20th centuries. Mainly these books are in history of law (especially Russian law), also there are historical and philological.
Optical character recognition is conducted for the most of books. All texts from old Russian spelling (before 1918) are transformed to modern spelling. Automatic spell-checking allows to present correctly 90% of words. Speed of such correction is about 200 pages per day without human monitoring. Than some of automatically corrected texts is edited by operators. The common quality of this work is 98–99%. All text will be used for full text search through the digital collection.