Public-Private Partnerships for Digitization: A Case-Study of UNC Libraries and Ancestry

The goal of this study is to add to the current scholarly discourse around public-private partnerships from the perspective of a university library/archive. This case-study examines the 2012-2015 public-private partnership between UNC Libraries and Ancestry. Through the partnership over 3 million pages of North Carolina Newspapers were digitized. Using semi-structured interviews and an examination of available primary sources, I explore the partnership motivations and outcomes, using the experiences of UNC Libraries to explore what relevant knowledge other intuitions should have entering a public-private partnership. I found that public-private partnerships create a series of trade-offs. I found UNC Libraries was able to leverage their partnership to create more access to their collections, but it was not a fast or easy process.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Metadata and Data Structures for the Historical Newspaper Digital Library

We examine metadata and data-structure issues for the Historical Newspaper Digital Library. This project proposes to digitize and then do OCR and linguisting processing on several years worth of historical newspapers. Newspapers are very complex information objects so developing a rich description of their content is challenging. In addition to frameworks for the logical structure and physical layout, we propose metadata relevant to the image processing and to the historians who will use this collection. Finally, we consider how the metadata infrastructure might be managed as it evolves with improved text processing capabilities and how an infrastructure might be developed to support a community of users. Keywords: Digital Libraries, History, Metadata, Newspapers, OCR. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. The Historical Newspaper Digital Library We have been engaged in a project to digitize and produce searchable full-text archives of historical newspapers [8]. Many of the historical newspapers in..