There is an excellent article over at the Stream comparing the electronic sources of the English Reports. Just like Drew Jackson, I love it when someone asks me for a case I know is one of the weird citations that are incorporated into the E.R.'s. I always feel like a superstar, which helps balance the "I have no idea what I'm doing" moments.
We have talked about the HeinOnline and CommonLII sources of this data on Slaw.
The usefulness of these, and other digitized collections of aging print, hit home for me this week. I was looking for some old (1800's) ministerial orders, and thanks to some excellent assistance from the staff at the Alberta Legislature Library, found them. Unfortunately, the collection was extremely fragile and the material was unable to be copied. The only option for collecting the data for research use was to take a photograph of each page. Perfectly reasonable, given the fragile nature of the resource; somewhat impractical for my purposes. Is your organization prepared for this type of scenario? Do you have a ready source of a high resolution camera for quick retrieval of fragile material?
Thankfully, I did not need to retrieve the items in the end. I have learned that it is a good idea to have a plan for this scenario. My print collection of English Reports is "read in library – do not photocopy". They are still on the shelf because they are beautiful, and fortunately not too fragile – yet.
As an emergency tool, the iPhone can do more than you think in a case like this. Though the camera is fairly duff, there's an app (for that) that can straighten up text pages (i.e. "unkeystone") and improve them with contrast and brightness controls, etc.
I've taken a photo of a page of Black's and saved it as a PDF (as the app allows). You can see that it's legible, if not lovely.
And, wonder of wonders, the app lets me send the PDF up to my Evernote account, where Evernote's OCR does it's work. I can then leave the text, searchable, in my cloud file, or download it as an OCR'd PDF. You can see that the program had a hard time reading some of the text, but got most of it just right.
Wow Simon. My Blackberry doesn't do that nearly so well.
I can take a photo that Zoom's up to be readable, however it doubtful that it is of a quality that could be OCR'd with anything close to accuracy.
Thank you for this emergency response path.
Great point, Shaunna, about the value of digitizing aging print collections. Speaking of aging legislative materials, with BC statutory material from the 1800s in our collection, we've at times photocopied & bound duplicate volumes in order to keep the collection from (literally) falling apart. Digitization of these older materials would be a very nice addition to the mix. In that respect, we're envious here in BC of the digitization of early legislation that you've been able to do in Alberta with the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project.