Technical Standards Committee: Intermediate Report
(as of Nov. 5, 2002)

(See http://www.library.cornell.edu/dmlib/rehmann.pdf)

It is suggested to set up public servers for

• format conversions
• performing ocr
• automatic supply of metadata for an article (using Dublin Core, Open Archive or similar encodings).
• upload digitized material to the DML.
• registry of all ongoing projects, keeping track of ongoing/completed/planned digitizing projects
  and allowing to input unnoticed material
• (may be even: scan servers? This should be a place with good scanning equipment, where people can send their paper material to in order to get it scanned at high quality.)

Reason: Setting up the DML is a task for many people and will last 10-15 years or longer. Any individual or institutional contribution of digitizations therefore should be welcome. Individuals should be encouraged and enabled to help.

In order to enable many contributors to provide digitized material in a sufficiently high quality, it is necessary to provide public tools to transform the material into the right format, which is sometimes technically demanding and to provide text layers by ocr (this should be optimized for the language the manuscript is written in, therefore it would be good to have public servers for the various language areas). Also, it should be easy for contributors to provide the scanned material with (elementary) metadata such as MSC, keywords and phrases on Dublin Core and/or Open Archive basis.