Decapod Project: Low-Cost, Portable Digitization

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NITLE is collaborating with the Decapod Project, an initiative focused on developing a low-cost, portable, single-unit digitization platform capable of producing high-quality PDFs with OCR'ed text. Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Decapod Project is particularly intended to help archives and researchers in the humanities; the portability in particular allows it to be transported easily to dispersed archives.

Chris Mackie of the Mellon Foundation presented Decapod at last summer's NITLE Camp at Smith College (June 1 - 4, 2009); attendees there responded with considerable interest. Camp attendees saw this work as responsive to the smaller scale and limited budgets of many of the archives at campuses in the NITLE Network, as well as to the fragility of materials in many archives. Given this interest, NITLE has entered a collaboration to help represent the liberal arts.

NITLE is providing two Fellows to work with Decapod. James Gehrt and Jenifer Bartle, NITLE Technology Fellows in Digitization Strategies, Technologies, and Practices, and their institutions (Mount Holyoke College and Wellesley College, respectively) have agreed to participate in this collaboration. Gehrt and Bartle will work with digitization and other experts involved with the Decapod Project, developing their expertise in digitization and inter-campus collaboration and serving as conduits for information back to the liberal arts community.

Goals of the Collaboration

  1. Involve liberal arts colleges and archives directly in design and testing of the Decapod project.
  2. Provide a means to test the applicability of this solution to liberal arts colleges and for the community to track progress of the project over time.
Next Steps

Technology Fellows will participate in design meetings, help test Decapod prototypes, and deliver workshops on this hardware/software solution. They will represent the liberal arts college community in the project, and work directly with the Decapod project principals and designers at the University of Toronto, JSTOR, and University of Kaiserslautern.

Stay tuned for updates on this collaboration.