Title: Digital Special Collections: Preserving, Restoring, and Displaying Damaged Scholarly Texts

Date: Monday, 12 February 2001

Time: 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater F (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater) Academic Concourse (near lift nos. 25/26) HKUST

Abstract:
There has been significant efforts to digitize library materials during the past decade, including traditional materials like modern books and journals, as well as non-traditional (special collections) materials, such as rare books, manuscripts, wax seals, papyrus scrolls, etc. For special collections materials, patrons and scholars desire "museum-quality" digital facsimiles that accurately preserve the look and feel of the originals. In addition, because many of these items are in poor condition, quality digitization offers a mechanism for digital restoration, whereby the digital facsimile can be restored and enhanced without risk of further damage to the original.

My research addresses three central challenges faced by scholars creating digital special collections: (1) for many objects, the acquisition process must acquire a 3D shape representation, (2) new digital restoration techniques can be formulated and applied when 3D shape information is available, and (3) new display environments, which have very high resolution, are needed to visualize high-resolution digital media. In this talk, I will present research contributions I have made that address these three challenges. In particular, I will discuss new techniques I have employed at the British Library to acquire 3D digital facsimiles of special collections items such as very old and damaged scholarly manuscripts. I will present a new framework that uses the acquired 3D data to aid in the restoration of damaged materials. Finally, I will detail new approaches for building rich display environments for visualizing high resolution digital media. This work is part of a broader research effort aimed at the continued development of sound principles and practices for the creation, restoration, and display of quality digital archives.

Biography:
Michael S. Brown is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky, studying under Dr. Brent Seales. He received a BS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky. He was a visiting Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for close to two years, working with the Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Visualization, under the direction of Dr. Henry Fuchs. Brown's research interests include computer vision, multimedia, graphics, and digital libraries.