Crawford points out that the mission of OAS includes fostering research and disseminating science-related ideas and information to Oklahomans who work in or are interested in the sciences. This dovetails nicely with the goal of the library Digitization Center, which is to preserve and provide access to materials that are of special interest to OSU and Oklahoma. Clearly the OAS Proceedings meet this criteria, Crawford explains. To meet this goal the OSU Library created the Digitization Center last year. The Center looks to identify printed materials suitable to convert to an electronic format and then make them available via the Internet.
Digitization is the latest method libraries and archives have used to preserve information.
Cokie Anderson, digitization librarian, explains the process. Basically, we are converting printed pages to computer files that can be accessed easily. For the OAS Proceedings, we began with the most recent volume and are working backwards. The text is then marked up in HTML for presentation on the Internet. Tables, figures, photos, etc. are treated as images and saved in JPEG format and links to the images are found throughout the article.