Digital Initiatives Center
Digitizing, preserving and providing open access to the law.
The Digital Initiatives Center at FIU Law Library curates legal scholarship in electronic format and publishes these resources through our eCollections institutional repository. The Center also maintains FIU Law’s HeinOnline Author Profiles, SSRN Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Selected Works, Google Scholar, and ORCiD. Through these initiatives, the Center supports the Scholarly Impact of FIU Law on an international scale, ensuring open access to legal materials and scholarship for generations to come.
eCollections is FIU Law’s open access institutional repository preserving significant works and moments associated with the FIU Law community. We currently collect faculty scholarship, house special collection materials, serve as the digital platform for the FIU Law Review and more.
FIU Law Review
The student-edited flagship publication of FIU Collect of Law, FIU Law Review is published open-access by FIU Law Library, and is a member of the Law Review Commons.
Faculty Scholarship
This series contains the works of Florida International University College of Law faculty, past and present. It includes materials published in law reviews, books and book chapters.
eCollections Exhibits
President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition Desmond Meade JD '14 FIU Law has contributed to civil rights in Florida.
HeinOnline ScholarCheck & Author Profiles
Citation metrics and publications count. The Digital Initiatives Center collaborates with HeinOnline to ensure our FIU Law scholars are counted accurately.
SSRN Legal Studies Research Paper Series
Legal scholarship as it is written. FIU Law scholars publish their works in progress and forthcoming articles in our SSRN Series. The Digital Initiatives Center maintains the Series and tracks downloads and impact.
Selected Works
Legal experts in different Disciplines and through Research Interests. FIU Law Faculty’s broad range of legal expertise is discovered through their Selected Works. The Digital Initiatives Center provides this searchable Gallery to shine a light on their expertise.
Initiatives
Partnerships
Digitization Process
The Digital Initiatives Center uses knowledge and experience acquired over years of digitization practice. FIU Law Library’s digitization efforts started with the purchase of a simple flatbed scanner and have grown into a comprehensive digitization process utilizing the specialized skills of trained digitization professionals and shared hardware and software resources. Our workflows and processes are freely available, published through our institutional repository, eCollections.
Scanning Documents
FIU Law Library’s Special Collections materials are the focus of the digitization efforts. These materials are fragile resources that require special care and handling. Through our partnership with FIU Digital Collections Center and Academic Imaging Services, FIU IT, digitization is performed on a purpose-driven basis utilizing equipment designed to scan our unique materials.
ATIZ BookDrive Pro – used to scan fragile items
EPSON Expression 10000XL – used to scan individual pages or manuscripts
Kirtas KABIS III – used to scan over-sized books
Quartz A0 HD – used to scan over-sized and especially fragile materials
Editing and Quality Control
All images go through an intensive editing and quality control process. Each image is checked for scanning errors, and sets are read to check for missing content. Each image is color corrected, de-skewed and cropped as needed to ensure that the image captured represents the document scanned. All images are 300 dpi resolution.
Editing and quality control is performed on site using Adobe Photoshop. Our student assistants perform this important work, essential for producing high-quality images.
OCR
Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process by which the scanned images are read by OCR software to capture the text contained in the image. The purpose of OCR is to enable machine readers to read the text in the images; OCR enables full text searching and crawling by internet search engines once uploaded to eCollections, reading by software used for ADA accommodation, and translation of languages. Images are simultaneously combined into a single PDF file during the process. Two softwares are utilized depending on the item type:
Prime OCR Recognition
Prime OCR is heavily relied upon due to the high-level of OCR achieved. Each document is set to its particular language, type set (font, hand-written, etc.) and justification (columns, paragraph, free-form).
ABBYY FineReader 12, at Digital Initiatives Center, FIU Law Library (two licenses).
This program is used when documents are not as complex, for example, English language and paragraph format. Images produced have high visual quality, are full-text searchable, and are acceptable for long-term digital archiving.
Optimization
As a final file conversion step, the resulting PDF from Prime OCR or ABBYY FineReader is optimized. Optimization in Adobe Acrobat Pro produces smaller-sized files, that enables and ensures shortest download speeds for our eCollections user.
Upload and Metadata Assignment
After digitization, the resulting optimized PDF files are uploaded to eCollections. Each item is uploaded individually by a cataloging librarian and metadata is assigned at the time of upload using the form created for the particular sub-collection.
The Digital Initiatives Center also stores the archival TIFF files on local and remote redundant servers. These images, along with the physical collections, are preserved by FIU Law Library and available to legal scholars on request.
Faculty Scholarship Services
The Digital Initiatives Center provides the following scholarship services for faculty. To request services, please Ask a Law Librarian.
- eCollections Faculty Scholarship
- Selected Works
- SSRN Legal Research Paper Series
- HeinOnline Author Profiles (requires login)
- ORCiD
- Google Scholar
A Digital Initiatives Specialist will work directly with FIU Law faculty to curate their internet-based profiles. All scholarship and profile information is maintained across platforms to ensure continuity of scholarly impact.
Contact Us
Information
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Contact
(305) 348-7206
(305) 809-7795
asklawlib@fiu.edu
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