Ingest, QA and Tagging

The Ingest step is an important one. Books arrive at the LibreDigital Processing Center via truck, via hard disk, via email, via FTP, etc. We accept incoming books in a wide variety of formats (see sidebar).

LibreDigital’s philosophy towards ingest is one focused on quality. The basic digitization process is often considered a commodity – on a global basis, there are a huge number of digitization shops. Being focused on Book Publishers, LibreDigital passes books through a rigorous ingest process in order to ensure the highest quality digital replica possible. For us, that means that all books scans are human-reviewed for quality – meaning clarity and fidelity to the original in texture, font rendering and lighting and crispness.

Post-ingest a digital book goes to tagging. During tagging, we assign HTML code to individual pages and we assign metadata to map the digital replica to the original book structure. We also can restrict certain pages from viewing.

After tagging, the digital book goes to “Final QA” and from that stage we verify image quality, tags and XML text (encoded text to make books searchable). From final QA, books travel to our publishing clients where the same checks are normally performed. Upon publisher’s acceptance, the digital book is now deemed “ready to vend” and is sent via DataPipe to the LDW. If the publisher wants changes, the books are reprocessed until accepted and deemed “ready to vend”.