King's College London

King's College London

Case Studies
King's College London
Book Scanning
OCR & Web Optimisation

Background
King's College is regarded as one of the world's leading multidisciplinary research universities, ranked 21st in the world by the 2016/17 QS World University Rankings.  King’s has over 27,600 students (including nearly 10,500 postgraduates) from some 150 countries and almost 6,800 employees.

The Challenge
King's College requested the digitisation of their historical academic calendars.  The books, dated from 1850 up to the 1990's, list the term times, exam schedules, names of professors, annual reports and other general information about the university at the time of print. The client envisiged publishing the books on the web so required compressed searchable PDFs, as well as a lossless format for digital preservation.

The Solution
Due to the delicate nature of some of the items, Transmedia used non destructive book scanning equipment and safe handling practices to ensure no damage occured during digitisation (for more information on Transmedia's book scanning service please click here).

The calendars were scanned to high resolution uncompressed TIFF format, then OCRd and output as optimised searchable PDFs for publishing on the web. The OCRd text was also output in XML format, to allow searching across the volumes on the website, and a JPEG thumbnail produced of every page for use as a preview image.

Client's website:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/

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