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The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of the baseline study on the state of digital heritage material preservation in Botswana.

The study was part of a three‐country United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Digital Heritage Preservation Project on the state of digital material preservation in Africa involving Botswana, Ethiopia and South Africa. The study uses the survey method consisting of various components data collection strategies including field work, document research, observations and the holding of a national consultative seminar an additional data input tool. The field study involved visiting 26 institutions that were identified as having the actual or potential of managing heritage materials in the country. Two other categories of institutions that were surveyed included the service providers of digitisation systems in the country.

Findings revealed weak policy formulation on digitization both at the institutional and national levels; weak legislative framework for digital preservation; ill‐defined national digitisation co‐ordination for digitisation activities at institutional, national and regional levels; lack of awareness about the potential of digital preservation by national heritage institutions; a dearth of human resources for digitization; and lack of common standards on digital heritage materials preservation in Botswana.

Although the study was limited to institutions dealing with digital heritage materials preservation, the outcome of the study sheds more light on the challenges of preservation of digital materials in most of the institutions in Botswana.

The results of this study presents useful strategic policy options for the management and preservation of digital materials in Botswana and other countries of Africa facing a similar environment.

There is a dearth of literature on preservation of digital heritage materials in Africa, and this study provides useful insights that are unique and comparative experiences that exist on this subject.

The authors investigate optical character recognition (OCR) technology and discuss its implementation in the context of digitisation of archival materials.

The typewritten transcripts of the Croatian Writers' Society from the mid-60s of the 20th century are used as the test data. The optimal digitisation setup is investigated in order to obtain the best OCR results. This was done by using the sample of 123 pages digitised at different resolution settings and binarisation levels.

A series of tests showed that different settings produce significantly different results. The best OCR accuracy achieved at the test sample of the typewritten documents was 95.02%. The results show that the resolution is significantly more important than binarisation pre-processing procedure for achieving better OCR results.

Based on the research results, the authors give recommendations for achieving optimal digitisation process setup with the aim of increasing the quality of OCR results. Finally, the authors put the research results in the context of digitisation of cultural heritage in general and discuss further investigation possibilities.

Performance-driven culture has received extensive attention from both academics and practitioners because of its impact on organisations’ performance. Employees’ tacit knowledge about performance-driven culture is pivotal to identify, as it contributes to increasing the organisation’s performance. With the aim of enriching ongoing debate in human resources and knowledge management research, this paper proposes a conceptual model for emancipating and investigating the main factors of employees’ tacit knowledge that shape and affect performance-driven culture of a Saudi Arabian organisation.

The validity of the conceptual model is examined through a qualitative study developed using a thematic analysis of 134 employees’ unbridged computerised typewritten comments about organisation’s performance-driven culture.

Findings confirm the utility of conceptual models in explaining and categorising employees’ emancipated tacit knowledge, providing a potential contribution to academics and practitioners interested in developing managerial processes for improving organisation’s performance-driven culture.

Both the conceptual reflections and empirical-based evidence herein enrich ongoing debate in the area of human resources and knowledge management about employees’ tacit knowledge and performance-driven culture.

The aim of this publication is to list the catalogues of the Department of Manuscripts which are in regular use. Catalogues which have been superseded by later publications are not normally included, since whatever their historical or bibliographical interest they are no longer everyday working tools. To save space in cross‐reference, the catalogues, etc., here listed have been numbered serially in Clarendon type, thus: 31. This numeration has no other significance.

THE wheels of the warring world continue to turn with as yet no obviously decisive result. In no place, however, does normal life prevail, however much it may appear to do so. We hear of unoccupied men and women, but rarely meet them; most able‐bodied folk have their national employment, as well as their vocation, today, and the whole race is better for it. Savage and critical as the scene is our people have kept physical and mental health in an unprecedented measure. So far as libraries are concerned, we live in times really remarkable, because the reading of books has been proved to be necessary to the well‐being of the community in the most strenuous days. A glance at the average library report will give evidence enough, and we are receiving more reports of late than in the first and second year of war. One such report, from Worthing, is a typewritten document showing that 55 per cent. of the population are actually enrolled, and that this town of less than sixty thousand people borrowed in 1941–2 little less than 800,000 volumes, a turnover of over twelve per head. We do not know that this is unique, but it must be regarded as the tale of a service which reaches everybody, because most books taken out of a library are read by several members of the household into which they go. While this is the tale of a seaside “neutral” area, from which, however, visitors are barred during “the invasion season,” in the more dangerous areas with their greatly reduced populations issues are returning to pre‐war levels. Even where this is not so, it is found that head for head more books are given out by public librarians than ever before. When we add to their work that of the subscription libraries, a great activity of which we have no figures, the claim that the English are becoming a literate nation seems to have some substance. Anyway, it reads words in enormous quantity.

Since translating is an office activity which, like other office activities, consists primarily of processing text, it is instructive to examine the reasons for automating text production. Most of these reasons will be equally applicable to the production of translated texts. We shall then investigate the current developments in machines and micro‐chip technology which are applicable to translation. These will include voice recognition and response and optical character recognition equipment amongst others.

Surrey Record Office locates and acquires records relating to the history of the county of Surrey, preserves them from loss or damage to ensure their survival as part of the heritage of the county and makes them available to all those who wish to use them for a wide range of research. High among the Record Office's priorities is increasing the ease with which the public are able to discover what information is available which is relevant to the subject of their enquiry.

The prosecution of many (if not most) white‐collar crimes depends on evidence produced by bank computers, and rests ultimately on the assumption that these systems are secure. One might think that this assumption was reasonable — after all, no bank whose customer records can be altered at will by hackers is likely to remain in business long. However, a number of recent cases have shown that banks' computer security claims cannot be relied on in evidence, for the simple reason that they are unwilling to allow defence experts to examine their security systems. The paper describes a number of recent cases, and discusses their implications.

The National Agricultural Library and forty‐two land grant libraries have entered into a cooperative project to test a new method of capturing full‐text and images in digital format for publication on CD‐ROM disks. The digital information management equipment will be installed at the National Agricultural Library, where scanning of selected agricultural collections will take place. The microcomputer/CD‐ROM workstations, search software, and collections on CD‐ROM disks of the selected agricultural information will be field tested by actual faculty and researchers at NAL and the forty‐two participating land grant libraries. During the first phase of the project, four CD‐ROMs containing four different sets of material and using four different retrieval packages will be tested.

Many libraries and archives maintain collections of research documents, such as administrative records, with paper-based formats that limit the documents' access to in-person use. Digitization transforms paper-based collections into more accessible and analyzable formats. As collections are digitized, there is an opportunity to incorporate deep learning techniques, such as Document Image Analysis (DIA), into workflows to increase the usability of information extracted from archival documents. This paper describes the authors' approach using digital scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and deep learning to create a digital archive of administrative records related to the mortgage guarantee program of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill.

The authors used a collection of 25,744 semi-structured paper-based records from the administration of G.I. Bill Mortgages from 1946 to 1954 to develop a digitization and processing workflow. These records include the name and city of the mortgagor, the amount of the mortgage, the location of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation agent, one or more identification numbers and the name and location of the bank handling the loan. The authors extracted structured information from these scanned historical records in order to create a tabular data file and link them to other authoritative individual-level data sources.

The authors compared the flexible character accuracy of five OCR methods. The authors then compared the character error rate (CER) of three text extraction approaches (regular expressions, DIA and named entity recognition (NER)). The authors were able to obtain the highest quality structured text output using DIA with the Layout Parser toolkit by post-processing with regular expressions. Through this project, the authors demonstrate how DIA can improve the digitization of administrative records to automatically produce a structured data resource for researchers and the public.

The authors' workflow is readily transferable to other archival digitization projects. Through the use of digital scanning, OCR and DIA processes, the authors created the first digital microdata file of administrative records related to the G.I. Bill mortgage guarantee program available to researchers and the general public. These records offer research insights into the lives of veterans who benefited from loans, the impacts on the communities built by the loans and the institutions that implemented them.