Article: “Towards an Open Web Repository for Civil Society Documentation”

From the Latest Issue (Fall 2016; Vol. 36, Num. 1) of CRL’s (Center for Research Libraries) Focus on Global Resources:

In 2014 the Carnegie Corporation of New York  awarded the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) funding to preserve and make available on the open web endangered government documentation from several African and Persian Gulf region nations. The $248,500 grant enabled the digitization of official gazettes that have been preserved over the past 60 years by CRL and its partner institutions.
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CRL significantly exceeded its projected targets of pages digitized from print and microfilm by leveraging production efficiencies. Through its partnership with the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC), CRL was able to scan nearly 80,000 pages of content from print sources. Likewise, CRL’s provider of document conversion services was able to scan nearly 544,000 pages from microfilm. In total, the project yielded 623,430 pages from print and film sources.
To augment the print and microfilm collections held by libraries, CRL also investigated the extent of published gazettes online on current government websites. Harvesting digital content from web sources (government sites or other academic programs) added 597,000 pages to the open web repository. In total, CRL’s efforts resulted in 1,220,456 pages—more than 40,000 issues—of key historical documentation made available together online for the first time.
CRL’s Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation digital collection became publicly available in June 2016.

Read the Complete Article 
Two Other Related Articles in this Issue of Focus on Global Resources Newsletter

• Official Gazettes— a History of Collecting Efforts in the United States

• Official Gazettes— Challenges to Access and Libraries’ Response

The complete issue is also available as PDF (11 pages) file.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Digital Preservation, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access