The authors present a case study of management issues encountered when an external organization with grant money and facilities to do digitization accepted the proposal to scan and host a collection of California Division of Mines & Geology Bulletins and California Department of Water Resources Bulletins. The Bulletins are very important historically for the rich information and maps they contain about California mines and minerals, geology, water resources, highways, and weather modification projects. They were difficult to digitize because the texts were accompanied by large, folded maps, many in color. The library was responsible for gathering the materials and providing bibliographic information for each item in the series. The Water Resources Bulletins were a complex set to identify bibliographically because the title spawned many subseries over time, some with imperfect numbering and others with uncertain relationship to the original series. This project involved staff from several departments across the library and coordination with two larger organizational entities. The authors describe challenges in managing all the activities of such a project under a tight timeline and make recommendations for efficient procedures. They also identify the need to formulate better metadata extraction algorithms for use with items that are part of a series, such as government documents and technical reports, in order for these materials to be discovered by researchers. The digitized images were linked in the university online catalog, made publicly available on the Internet Archive website, and, in collaboration with the California Digital Library, deposited for preservation in the Hathi Trust. The methods developed for this pilot project will serve as a model for future collaborative endeavors involving preparations for digitizing bibliographically complex sets.
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