Genus is pleased to announce the recent installation of Goobi workflow to aid digitisation processes in-house and on-site.
Goobi’s core task is to manage digitisation project workflows – in a combination of several different steps. In the case of retro-digitisation, this may, for example, involve many relatively short tasks performed by several staff in an established order (cataloguing, scanning, image post-processing, producing derivatives, capturing structural data and metadata, archiving, etc.). Goobi’s role is to coordinate all those involved and thus ensure that all the work is carried out fully, accurately and in the right order – making us the only digitisation company in the UK working to these standards and to this degree of accuracy.
Direct and flexible collaboration
And it’s not just limited to our digitisation studio, Goobi can be used to create a single team for all our project staff wherever they are located – in-house or on-site, different buildings, cities and regions throughout Europe and all over the world. Even for large projects, the task of coordinating those involved is very straightforward. Since Goobi is a web-based application, it does not matter whether users are working in the same place. Many libraries, archives and museums use Goobi to coordinate teams that are spread across a wide area. There is no need to install additional software to allow project staff to work together. All they need is a simple web browser. This ensures that the users environment remains consistent so that every member of the team, at each site, can work productively. Goobi is a permission based solution, so only those who are allocated a specific task can see their part of the workflow. As Genus uses Goobi to manage our digitisation projects we can provide our customers with a login to view the status of their project and even deliver finalised content straight to the customers FTP as an automated process.
So, what is Goobi?
Goobi is an open-source software application for digitisation projects. It allows you to model, manage and supervise freely definable production processes and is used daily by many institutions to handle all the steps involved in creating a digital library. These include importing data from library catalogues, scanning and content-based indexing and the digital presentation and delivery of results in popular standardised formats – from book to online presentation.
The software also facilitates the transparent supply of materials such as scanned images or OCR results from different sources or from external service providers and allows you to keep a clear overview of even the most complex workflows containing many individual steps and distributed over several sites.
Why use Goobi?
The task of organising individual and complex digitisation workflows places extremely high and varying demands on software. The approach followed by Goobi allows you to incorporate an enormous range of site-specific factors. Based on the workflows compiled at the beginning of the project, you can ensure that all the texts you wish to digitise follow the same workflow. This means that each process can be specified in advance and guarantees that your output meets defined quality standards. An intuitive user interface allows the project manager to specify each step of the project and to integrate mandatory testing routines into the workflow with a view to validating the results of each step as quickly as possible. This avoids time-consuming correction loops and a considerable manual effort. Goobi also lets you automate repetitive manual tasks for greater consistency and accuracy. As a result, each volume can pass through the entire workflow much more rapidly than is the case using manual digitisation techniques.
Who uses Goobi?
As you would expect, since Goobi is a German software project, its use is most widespread in Germany. Apart from museums and archives, its main area of application is in university libraries. The digitisation programmes involved vary in size from quite modest projects at smaller institutions to large-scale digitisation at major Germany university libraries. Since 2008, interest in Goobi has also grown strongly outside Germany. Thanks to its tremendous flexibility and systematic multilingual design, Goobi is now in regular and productive use coordinating digitisation project workflows at a number of centres outside Germany (e.g. Austria, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Rwanda, Israel and the USA).
How do I get Goobi?
You can try Goobi for free with the new Goobi-to-go download!
This version of Goobi-to-go is suitable for productive operation within your digitisation projects. However, if you are planning a large-scale project, it may be more effective to install Goobi on a standalone server and integrate an authentication system such as LDAP or Active Directory.
Download Goobi-to-Go
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