Paper to Screen: Processing Historical Scans in the ADS

The NASA Astrophysics Data System in conjunction with the Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is working on a project to microfilm historical observatory publications. The microfilm is then scanned for inclusion in the ADS. The ADS currently contains over 700,000 scanned pages of volumes of historical literature. Many of these volumes lack clear pagination or other bibliographic data that are necessary to take advantage of the searching capabilities of the ADS. This paper will address some of the interesting challenges that needed to be resolved during the processing of the Observatory Reports included in the ADS. Brief overview of the process of metadata capture In order to be able to utilize the sophisticated searching capabilities of the ADS for the scanned publications, page numbers and article metadata (e.g. title, author, beginning and ending pages) must be generated. A software tool to aid in the capture of these metadata has been developed and is available on the ADS web site. A number of volunteers have worked with this interface and have generated the data for approximately 450 volumes of 44 different titles. Some of the observatory publications that have been processed and are now searchable with the ADS include selections from the following: Annals of Harvard College Observatory; Astronomical and Meteorological Observations made at the U.S. Naval Observatory; Beobachtungs-Ergebnisse der Koniglichen Sternwarte zu Berlin; and Contributions from the Rutherford Observatory of Columbia University New York. The capture of the metadata must be done in two stages. In the first stage, page numbering mode, the scans are viewed sequentially and a page number is assigned to each image and duplicate scans are marked to be removed. (See Figure 1.) Once this process has been completed the second stage, article metadata mode, can be done. At this time the images are shown with the assigned page numbers and the article information (author, title, first/last page, and abstract) can be entered. (See Figure 2.) Once these data have been checked and processed further by the ADS staff the articles in this collection become searchable using the ADS. Many volunteers from around the world have participated in this project. As of June 2006 more than 120 people signed up as contributors. A Smithsonian 1