Presented by Edgardo B. Quiros at PAARL's Forum on Digital Debates on Archives, Museums and Libraries, held at SMX Convention Center, SM Mall of Asia Complex, Pasay City, 17 September 2009

1. Issues, Challenges and
perspectives of digitization: the
NLP experience
A Presentation for 12th SEAPAVAA Conference
“Digital debates on archives, museums and libraries”
Meeting Rooms 5-6, SMX Convention Center, SM Mall of Asia
Manila, Philippines
Sep 17, 2009
By Edgardo Quiros
Chief, IT Division
National Library of the Philippines

2. Background
Digitization of Filipiniana books under
copyright registration
Digitization of Copyright registration
documents
Philippine eLibrary
Now a program covering Filipiniana
materials

3. The Digitization Experience

4. Phase 1: Outsourced
 25 million pages target was achieved in less
than 1 year in 2004
 By 2007, re-work is still ongoing to correct
unreadable pages. It was stopped because it
will take longer to perform quality control
compared to re-scanning by our staff.
 Some originals sustained damages
 Output file size is large

5. Phase 2: In-house
1 million pages target was achieved in 1
year in 2007 (Equivalent to 3-year
productivity of another outsourced
project of similar staffing)
Non-destructive techniques were used to
prevent damages
Output file size is smaller
Quality is better than phase 1

6. Our Gains from In-house
Digitization
Digitized document as output (in
outsourcing this is the only
output)
Ability to digitized materials with
limited budget including
materials with few pages.
Outsourcing requires a minimum
volume of materials.
Better quality of digitized

7. Our Gains from In-house
Digitization
 Minimal damage/loss, if none at all, to
delicate materials
 Procured equipment, computer
hardware and software can be used
to digitize more materials (new
materials are added each year)
 Procured equipment, computer
hardware and software is useful in
post-digitization services such as
information repackaging and delivery

8. Comparison
Phase 1 PDF file size Phase 1 PDF file size
of a page of a page
218 KB 41 KB
*see sample page *see sample page

9. Phase 1 sample page

10. Phase 2 sample page

11. Our Gains from In-house
Digitization
 Staff gained skills, experience and
knowledge
 Achieved faster delivery of digitized
materials due to very minimal time
spent in training, selection,
organization, and quality control
 Reports, guides, and papers from the
digitization activity now serves as
reference materials
 Developed appropriate workflows for
each material

12. eLibrary URL
Visit us at:
www.elib.gov.ph

13. Thank you and
Mabuhay!