Scopa Grant Proposal

SCOPA Professional Development Grant Proposal - Nuremberg Trials, vol. 12,13,14,15

Project Description

The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School is an effort to place on-line in HTML format documents in the fields of Law, History, Economics, Political Science, Diplomatic Relations and Government. As a part of the overall project we propose to digitize, markup and mount the Trial of the Major German War Criminals ("the Proceedings"). We would use the SCOPA Grant to mount volumes 12,13,14 and 15 of the Proceedings. This is a continuation and complements the Nuremberg material already mounted including volumes 1-4, the Indictment, Judgment, Rules of Procedure and Charter.

Contribution of the Project to the Library and Information Science Community

The project contributes to the richness of the Yale Libraries' collections and makes available material which can now be found only in a select few major research collections. In light of recent world events, these documents are of immense historical value and current importance. In addition we are mounting not just static HTML files but rather files which have been enriched with hypertext links to supporting documents. For example, in the Nuremberg material, links from the Judgment to other documents, such as the Charter and various Treaties and International Agreements and to documents of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) are provided from within the Judgment text. We are experimenting with and exploring methods for presenting over the World Wide Web large collections of related documents. The Nuremberg material currently mounted is available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm.

Methodology

Thanks to a generous donation by William S. Hein &Co., Inc. we already have the page images of volumes 12-15. The remainder of the process would occur as follows:

          
          1.  Convert the images to ASCII text via Optical Character 
Recognition (OCR)
          2.  Cleanup the textual errors resulting from the conversion to 
ASCII text using word
              processing spell check utilities
          3.  Convert ASCII text to HTML.
          4.  Enrich the HTML text with links to supporting documents and 
cited documents.
          5.  Mount the files with the other Nuremberg material already 
mounted as a part of  the
              Avalon Project.

Timeline

• One week to OCR images
• Two to Four Months to Cleanup the OCRed text
• Four to Six Months to complete the HTML markup and enrichment.

Project Related Expenses

We determined, based on our experience with volume 2 that the cost to OCR, fully, correct, verify and markup a volume using student assistants at $8.00/hour is $300. The total cost for volumes 12,13,14 and 15 would be $1200.