JISC

At the recent JISC Programme conference, held in Brighton between 6^th and 7^th July, we took the opportunity to conduct a couple of interviews with individuals who work with JISC in the UK and overseas. Simon Brackenbury is Project Manager with the JISC funded  British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service  (BOPCRIS). One core activity of BOPCRIS is to scan rare and historical parliamentary documents using unique precision built equipment which has never before been used in the UK.  

Simon, could you explain a little bit more about what your JISC-funded project is doing?

We are based at the University of Southampton and have been working now for about ten years on digitising parliamentary papers and producing search tools and bibliographic databases to help users get to the information they need. 

So was that work originally known as BOPCRIS?

We started with a current awareness service called BOPCAS in 1995, and that is winding down now as more people are using Google and we have discovered that there is more interest in the historic material pre 1995 and that is really where the focus of our attention has been recently. 

BOPCRIS has been in preparation for around six months now and the full production stage is due to commence in August. We are digitising all the original printed parliamentary materials from the 18^th Century. To do this, we will be using a robotic book scanner. It is the first of its kind in the UK and the second in the world to be used in an academic library. 

Have you now acquired the robotic scanner?

Yes, it arrived on the 30^th June. In order to get into the University, we had to take some windows out, and had a crane hoist it inside. It is colossal, weighing about a tonne and being around the size of a transit van.

Robotic scanning equipment, unique in the UK, which is being used by the BOPCRIS project

Could you explain a little more about how the robot works?

It uses a vacuum technique to lift pages, and then flip them over. Lasers detect where page edges are. It is Swiss made, so it is a precision instrument. Obviously, as the documents being scanned are original and unique historical documents, the scanning process must be undertaken very delicately. 

So what speed are these pages actually being scanned and what are the quantities we are looking at?

It scans at around 600 pages per hour, and we are looking to scan around one million over the course of a year. 

What is the project planning to do once this material has been digitised?

Well, in one sense this work is really a case study in automation. We are trying to scale up production so that we are not just hand-crafting small collections of material, rather we are planning to put together large data sets. These are going to make a whole difference in the discipline for eighteenth century historians. The main products, therefore, will be a freely available, fully searchable comprehensive database of previously inaccessible parliamentary material. There is synergy with other CSR2 projects though. As they contain primary resource material from 18^th – 20^th Centuries as well, together we could fill digital gaps in documenting and breathing life in to previously hard to access materials. A user could search across a wealth of images, sound archives, archived newspapers and news documentaries. 

Thank you for your time and we will look forward to an update on progress soon.