U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center Announces Large-Scale Digitization Project to Create Digital Repository of 33 Million Images and Other Materials

From The Sentinel (Carlisle, PA):

The Army Heritage Center Foundation [located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania] Tuesday announced that the U.S. Army has awarded a digitization contract to QualX Corp. to deliver a large-scale digitization project to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center over the next five years.
QualX, with its one-year contract and four option years, and its two subcontractors, Iron Mountain Inc. and TDEC, will create a digital repository, enabling Army leaders and educators, veterans, students and researchers from around the world to have access to the archival collection of military materials,

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From a Joint Announcement:

This collection includes nearly 300 years of manuscripts, photographs, audio-visual items, artifacts, and other records that are vital to the preservation of America’s armed forces history.
The project includes processing, digitizing, storage and movement of these artifacts – all done in a secure environment with procedures that ensure the preservation and protection of this historically valuable material. The result of this effort will be the creation of a digital repository, enabling researchers around the world to have access to this unique archival collection of military materials, including an estimated 33 million indexed images.
As part of this digitization and preservation effort, Iron Mountain will securely transport this collection from its current home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to Iron Mountain’s Jessup, Maryland facility. Iron Mountain and QualX will then digitize the collection – approximately 24,000 linear feet of unclassified archival collections, ranging from modern paper records to extremely rare and delicate documentation – in accordance with USAHEC digitization standards. TDEC will collect the metadata from this collection and ensure they have clean optical character recognition (OCR) for all scanned PDF documents, maintaining quality control for the digital images.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Preservation