Featured Collection: Digital Daily Kent Stater Archive New Feature: Veridian QA View - Visualizing ALTO XML Coming Up: 2017 Veridian User Interface Upgrade
Featured Collection: Digital Daily Kent Stater Archive
Earlier this month Kent State University marked the completion of the Digital Daily Kent Stater Archive after four years' development, starting in early 2013. The Kent Stater Archive contains 90 years of Kent State student publications, dated from Feb 1926 to Dec 2016. It covers several historic events as well as some great memories for the Kent State alumnae. To celebrate this success the people at Kent Statue University created an introductory video to share with the rest of the world. We hope you enjoy this video as much as we did!
New Feature: Veridian QA View - Visualizing
ALTO XML
In our experience there are a number of types of “hidden errors” that occur with newspaper data batches. These errors can’t be detected by automated QA (Quality Assurance) processes and are often overlooked, as they are not visible on presentation systems like Veridian or Chronicling America. So you effectively end up with “valid” newspaper batches that pass all the automated validation processes, but which contain significant underlying errors. We have written an article that explains further these hidden errors as well as their implications. Read more here...
In order to avoid these “hidden errors”, our solution is to make them visible so they can be picked up as part of the data conversion and QA process. This solution has helped us identify many widespread quality issues and has been a very useful tool to raise the quality of page-level METS/ALTO. Because of that, as of September 2017, it has been implemented as a standard feature in Veridian.
In the past few months, the Veridian QA view (the ability to visualize ALTO XML) has been implemented and that allows Veridian collection administrators to inspect the underlying ALTO data once they are ingested
into Veridian. This hopefully can help all of the Veridian collections to communicate better with their data conversion vendors to produce better quality Page-level METS/ALTO.
The Veridian QA view feature allows administrator users to toggle the QA view to visualize the underlying data structure (TextBlocks) of each ALTO XML and help them identify the following errors:
Determine if the TextBlocks are out of reading order.
Determine if there is widespread issue of missing TextBlocks.
Determine if there is widespread issue of incorrect TextBlocks, e.g. blocks run across two or more columns of a newspaper page.
If you are interested in adding this capability to your Veridian collection. Please feel free to contact us and schedule a upgrade.
Coming Up: 2017 Veridian User Interface Upgrade
As much as we love our old-fashioned interface, it's time to give Veridian a 2017 look. Take a peek at some of our new interface screenshots and join us in next month's Veridian Newsletter to find out more about our new interface design for 2017.
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