The press has produced a fascinating video about their activities in the new high tech areas of publishing. They have adopted ebooks and print on demand and have actually reissued 15,000 titles in their backlist in POD. The video covers the process of digitizing rare out of print books and you can see “cold stacks” where the books are kept and the scanning process, itself.
Wonderful video, though a bit short on the geeky technical details I’m most interested in, and a bit long on PR for the Uni and its press and library.
One thing shocked me: in the scene of scanning, the attendant wears no gloves — not even a latex fingertip covering — and presses one finger down on every single verso folio of the book. Ack! have they never heard of skin oils, acids, dirt?
I would like to reassure ‘pond’ that gloves are available to the scanner operators, but that we work within the handling parameters laid down by the librarians and conservators of the books we scan. Gloves are not always thought to be necessary or indeed desirable.