Comments on: Why isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:55:39 +0000

I’m a big fan of decent greyscale images, and in many cases those will do the trick at a more manageable filesize. Greyscale options are available in Ariel and Odyssey and I’d like to see them used more often as a default as well.

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:54:19 +0000

The main reason I mention pay per use is that sometimes our users need the type of image quality and flexibility to manipulate that can only be provided by the original image. Depending on their intended use of the image that requires that sort of quality, it might be more appropriate that they purchase the item directly from the publisher. All publishers with online content should be encouraged to have a reasonably pricing per per view option.

By: barbara fister

barbara fister — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:09:00 +0000

We’ve considered buying articles for individuals as opposed to ILL but libraries like ours are having to budget tens of thousands of dollars to fund such programs (which benefit people one on one, can’t be used by anyone else) – we don’t have that kind of money. It also is an abandonment of the idea of fair use. I have very mixed feelings about the pay per view library, but since I have no money for it anyway, I don’t yet have to confront them head-on.

By: Valinda Carroll

Valinda Carroll — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:50:09 +0000

Even when requesting image-heavy art history articles, I still receive horrible black and white copies. I can see how color may be cost prohibitive, but decent grey scale images would work better than the illegible images in ILL articles.

I suspect that many of these older publications were digitized from microfilm copies. The microfilm has a pretty lousy tonal range, so the resultant image is virtually useless before it gets compressed even further by scanning and Ariel.

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:53:17 +0000

Publishers are certainly part of this equation. While many libraries have color scanning capacity, many do not have the ability to print in color and then re-scan. And as you say the time to do so and the quality are another barrier. This is where publishers need to offer reasonably priced and convenient direct article purchase models so that libraries will be able to purchase the original content for less than the transactional cost of an ILL request.

By: barbara fister

barbara fister — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:50:20 +0000

One issue is that some publishers we love to hate won’t let a library with an electronic subscription loan an article unless they print it out and then rescan it. Degraded quality guaranteed, but more by order of the publisher than by the library. This is likely to be a growing point of friction as more and more journals are online only (but still incredibly expensive).

Open access week, here we come!

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:39:26 +0000

The ILL/DD community is definitely home to the practical advice for dealing with the systems we have today. I hope this will launch a discussion about color that leads to best practices for today and the future.

I don’t have an answer for your specific questions, but hopefully the Ariel and Odyssey developers are reading and can respond. Experimenting with your scanning technology and version of the software, as well as incorporating other file reduction strategies can help you reach a happy medium on what is useful to users but distributable to the average library. We have seen that trying to reduce DPI to make color files smaller can make the text hard to read–be sure to take care for the text as well as the images. Good luck!

By: Brian Miller

Brian Miller — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:20:01 +0000

Do you have any best-practices you can share in regard to what scanner settings to use when providing color copies? Do you recommend decreasing the DPI when using color to help limit file size? Do you know what the maximum file size is for sending via Ariel or Odyssey and approximately how many color pages it takes before that maximum is reached? Some practical advice based on your experiences would be great!

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:06:44 +0000

Thanks for the encouragement. I think we’ve worked really hard to improve ILL/DD speed and now quality is the next frontier!

By: Kris Alpi

Kris Alpi — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:05:56 +0000

As someone with a History of Art degree, I completely agree with you about the utility of color. Art researchers that I have known tend to address their need for color when making requests. I assume that art libraries have high-quality color scanning technologies available for their users, but I am not sure whether that carries over into their ILL/DD services.