CASE STUDY
Digital Scholarship: Rotunda’s Historic Collection of Scholarly Books
Challenge
Founded in 1963, The University of Virginia Press (UVAP) has published over 1,000 book titles spanning across humanities and social sciences subjects. Twelve years ago, UVAP started an imprint called Rotunda for web-based publications, both born-digital and adaptations of print content.
Rotunda titles include the Papers of George Washington; the Papers of James Madison; Buildings of the United States; the Victorian Literature and Culture Series, and many other fascinating topics. Rotunda identified that it was imperative to create digital, full-text XML for each title across their collection to increase scholarly research, provide books in a digital format, and enable more granular searching and navigation of content.
To reach this goal, a partner was needed to digitize and encode books in accordance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML standard.
Solution
Rotunda selected Apex Content & Media Solutions as its partner for creating digital books. Apex’s digitization technology and processes provided Rotunda with a scalable solution to scan, key, and encode each character into structured, full-text book XML with detailed metadata.
Apex’s expert team of XML analysts, digitization technology, and custom workflows provided a unique balance of technology, and human touch to create world class digital products with industry-leading quality.
Results
An enhanced digital version of each converted book is now available on Rotunda’s website for digital scholarship at the University of Virginia and beyond. The creation of well-formed XML by Apex helped Rotunda achieve:
- Digitally accessible and searchable books
- Open Access availability of content at founders.archives.gov
- Increased readership and engagement via online access
- 4,000 daily users and growing
- Availability of select out-of-print books for the first time in decades
- Open sharing of rich historical data for scholarly research and learning
- Long-term use and portability of digitized titles across future XML standards
Apex has converted virtually every conceivable form of paper-based and born-digital content. Contact us to learn more about digitizing your collection.