Production Producing Media
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Producing Media
The produciton of Alternate Media can be a compromise between timeliness, quality, and cost. To produce a high volume of material in a short timeframe means it is very challenging to maintain the highest levels of quality. AMAC is working with publishers, vendors, and Assistive Technology providers to improve the long-term outlook.
Scanning
Scanning is an imperfect process, but is still the foundation technology of Alternate Media. We have two scanners, a Kodak 660 and a Canon 9080c. Books are usually scanned at 400dpi black and white, although some books may require color or gray-scale and different resolutions. We enter the information about the scan into the record for that book, then place the scan on the server in the correct folder ('A######/in scan pdf').
Assigning Media to Vendor
If the scanned PDF is going to be converted to formatted PDF by codeMantra, our primary vendor, we edit the media record to associate codeMantra as the vendor, and change the status of the media to 'assigned'. The next step is to upload the PDF to codeMantra's ftp site. codeMantra has their own NEON dashboard where they can see the media assigned to them.
In-house Production
If a scanned PDF is going to be formatted by AMAC staff, the status is changed to 'To Do', and a member of the production staff will assign the media to themselves and begin formatting the book. Usually books are produced in page order from start to finish, but the order can be changed if there is a specific request to do so. Generally we use Abbyy FineReader to do OCR on the file, and save the results as PDF text+image.
Formatting Media
There are two major factors that impact the way media is formatted: the source of the file and the subject of the book.
The source could be the publisher, a vendor, in-house produciotn, or other (a campus, the AMX). Files from publishers are the least consistent, as there is no easy way to tell how the file was created. Some publisher files are clearly derived from the 'print quality' file used in the produciton of the book. These files often have 'trim' marks outsidxe the page boundaries, which need to be removed.
The subject matter of the book determines if the book contains mostly or all tex, text plus simple images, or a mix of text, images, and symbols, such as math, chemistry, and other sciences. Some subject areas do not translate well into alternative media, so in those cases we may have to leave parts of the book as images within the text.
There are a number of formatting tasks that help create a consistent product, such as:
- Be sure all file names make sense and reflect the contents of the file (ie, 'Chapter 01')
- Remove all trim marks and other publisher artefacts
- Compress and 'flatten' files to reduce size
- Split large publisher files into smaller files (less than 20MB) that are less likely to cause problems for certain reading software
- Add bookmarks to PDFs, which enable easier navigation within large files (PDFs from codeMantra come with bookmarks)
Adding Media to Inventory
Once a file is completed, either by a vendor or staff, it is zipped and put in the appropriate folder on the AMAC
server (sometimes referred to as the Snap server). The next step is to create a new Media record in NEON, which also provides the suggested file name and folder for the file to go in. These names and locations are standardized to facilitate the direct download of files by students and service providers.
