Bulletin Des Amis du Vieux Hué (BAVH)

Sector

Publishing

Background

The "BAVH" is an extensive historical academic publication representing:

• 121 books
• 558 articles
• 12,000 pages of text
• 4,000 maps, pictures and illustrations
• 120 interactive tables of content
• 1,200 links embedded in two original historical indexes
• 480,000 full-text indexed terms
• 18,000 hours of development
• Fully preserved original layout and non-Latin typography

Solution

Harvey Nash digitised this complete collection of 121 rare historical books and compelling scientific publications about Central Vietnam’s history, culture and tradition, published from 1914 to 1944. This series is a legendary reference for historians and researchers specialising in Asian studies.

This extensive data conversion project was a massive challenge due to the linguistic and graphical diversity of the content. Harvey Nash had to preserve the scientific accuracy of the content, which includes material in 12 different languages (including French, English, Chinese and Vietnamese), and also preserve countless illustrations and maps of different sizes. The books themselves were in a very deteriorated state due to moisture, paper acidity and even worm colonies.

Result

With this project, Harvey Nash has demonstrated that digitalisation and OCR can now completely and accurately replace the use of microfilm for preserving historical records, even when the original records are so extensive and so physically deteriorated. The CD-ROM was developed using Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) technology and production tools