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achieved with binary scanning only, and noted the great promise in gray
scale and color scanning, whose advantages and disadvantages need to be
examined.  She argued further that scanning resolutions and file formats
can represent a complex trade-off between the time it takes to capture
material, file size, fidelity to the original, and on-screen display; and
printing and equipment availability.  All these factors must be taken
into consideration.

CXP placed primary emphasis on the production in a timely and
cost-effective manner of printed facsimiles that consisted largely of
black-and-white text.  With binary scanning, large files may be
compressed efficiently and in a lossless manner (i.e., no data is lost in
the process of compressing [and decompressing] an image--the exact
bit-representation is maintained) using Group 4 CCITT (i.e., the French
acronym for International Consultative Committee for Telegraph and
Telephone) compression.  CXP was getting compression ratios of about
forty to one.  Gray-scale compression, which primarily uses JPEG, is much
less economical and can represent a lossy compression (i.e., not
lossless), so that as one compresses and decompresses, the illustration
is subtly changed.  While binary files produce a high-quality printed
version, it appears 1) that other combinations of spatial resolution with
gray and/or color hold great promise as well, and 2) that gray scale can
represent a tremendous advantage for on-screen viewing.  The quality
associated with binary and gray scale also depends on the equipment used. 
For instance, binary scanning produces a much better copy on a binary
printer.

Among CXP's findings concerning the production of microfilm from digital
files, KENNEY reported that the digital files for the same Reed lecture
were used to produce sample film using an electron beam recorder.  The
resulting film was faithful to the image capture of the digital files,
and while CXP felt that the text and image pages represented in the Reed
lecture were superior to that of the light-lens film, the resolution
readings for the 600 dpi were not as high as standard microfilming. 
KENNEY argued that the standards defined for light-lens technology are
not totally transferable to a digital environment.  Moreover, they are
based on definition of quality for a preservation copy.  Although making
this case will prove to be a long, uphill struggle, CXP plans to continue
to investigate the issue over the course of the next year.

KENNEY concluded this portion of her talk with a discussion of the
advantages of creating film:  it can serve as a primary backup and as a
preservation master to the digital file; it could then become the print
or production master and service copies could be paper, film, optical
disks, magnetic media, or on-screen display.

Finally, KENNEY presented details re production:

     * Development and testing of a moderately-high resolution production
     scanning workstation represented a third goal of CXP; to date, 1,000
     volumes have been scanned, or about 300,000 images.

     * The resulting digital files are stored and used to produce
     hard-copy replacements for the originals and additional prints on
     demand; although the initial costs are high, scanning technology
     offers an affordable means for reformatting brittle material.

     * A technician in production mode can scan 300 pages per hour when
     performing single-sheet scanning, which is a necessity when working
     with truly brittle paper; this figure is expected to increase
     significantly with subsequent iterations of the software from Xerox;
     a three-month time-and-cost study of scanning found that the average
     300-page book would take about an hour and forty minutes to scan
     (this figure included the time for setup, which involves keying in
     primary bibliographic data, going into quality control mode to
     define page size, establishing front-to-back registration, and
     scanning sample pages to identify a default range of settings for
     the entire book--functions not dissimilar to those performed by
     filmers or those preparing a book for photocopy).

     * The final step in the scanning process involved rescans, which
     happily were few and far between, representing well under 1 percent
     of the total pages scanned.

In addition to technician time, CXP costed out equipment, amortized over
four years, the cost of storing and refreshing the digital files every
four years, and the cost of printing and binding, book-cloth binding, a
paper reproduction.  The total amounted to a little under $65 per single
300-page volume, with 30 percent overhead included--a figure competitive
with the prices currently charged by photocopy vendors.

Of course, with scanning, in addition to the paper facsimile, one is left
with a digital file from which subsequent copies of the book can be
produced for a fraction of the cost of photocopy, with readers afforded
choices in the form of these copies.

KENNEY concluded that digital technology offers an electronic means for a
library preservation effort to pay for itself.  If a brittle-book program
included the means of disseminating reprints of books that are in demand
by libraries and researchers alike, the initial investment in capture
could be recovered and used to preserve additional but less popular
books.  She disclosed that an economic model for a self-sustaining
program could be developed for CXP's report to the Commission on
Preservation and Access (CPA).

KENNEY stressed that the focus of CXP has been on obtaining high quality
in a production environment.  The use of digital technology is viewed as
an affordable alternative to other reformatting options.

                                 ******

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ANDRE * Overview and history of NATDP * Various agricultural CD-ROM
products created inhouse and by service bureaus * Pilot project on
Internet transmission * Additional products in progress *
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pamela ANDRE, associate director for automation, National Agricultural
Text Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL),
presented an overview of NATDP, which has been underway at NAL the last
four years, before Judith ZIDAR discussed the technical details.  ANDRE
defined agricultural information as a broad range of material going from
basic and applied research in the hard sciences to the one-page pamphlets
that are distributed by the cooperative state extension services on such
things as how to grow blueberries.

NATDP began in late 1986 with a meeting of representatives from the
land-grant library community to deal with the issue of electronic
information.  NAL and forty-five of these libraries banded together to
establish this project--to evaluate the technology for converting what
were then source documents in paper form into electronic form, to provide