Electronic Publishing of Digitised Works

This paper describes the automated process to create structured master and access copies for the digitised works at the BND – National Digital Library. The BND created during 2004 and 2005 nearly half million of digitised images, from more than 25.000 titles of printed works, manuscripts, drawings and maps. The resulting of the digitisation process is a group of TIFF image files representing the surfaces of the original works, which needs yet to be processed in order to be stored and published. Doing that manually would be a very complex and expensive task, with risks for the uniformity of the results, so it was need to develop an automated solution. To create the technical metadata, apply image processing actions and OCR, create derived copies for access in PNG, JPG, GIF, and PDF, we developed a tool named SECO. To create the master copies for each of those works, for preservation, and access copies in HTML, we developed a tool names CONTENTE, which exists as a standalone tool and as a library. Finally the copies are deposited and registered at the BND repository through the service PURL.PT, which assures also the WEB and intranet access control. This complex process is fully automated through several XML schemas for the control of the processes, description of the results (including the OCR outputs), descriptive metadata (in Dublin Core, MARC XML, etc.) and rights and structural metadata (in METS).