The Library of Congress houses a vast collection of cultural heritage materials and aims to increase accessibility by digitizing items. It uses various digitization centers and contractors to accomplish this at scale. Quality management is needed to ensure uniform results across different equipment and locations. The Library uses DICE (Digital Imaging Conformance Evaluation), developed over many years, to provide assurance that images from any scanner are interchangeable. DICE evaluates color accuracy and is the standard used by many institutions for quality control in digitization. The author is working to develop the next generation of DICE's color accuracy module to evaluate how well scanners capture true colors, compatible with the original DICE and international standards.

1. Quality Management for Digitization
An Assessment Tool for Measuring the Accuracy of Digitized Colors
The Library of Congress is the largest library in existence, and houses a massive collection of cultural
heritage materials from all over the world. One of the Library’s main goals is to increase the accessibility of
these treasures to the public by making them available through the web. To accomplish this, the Library has
created digitization centers here in Washington and at remote sites, and also uses independent contractors.
Why do we need quality management?
It is a challenge to ensure that all of these efforts
work together to produce uniform results, because
there are inherent inconsistencies when different
equipment is used at different locations. Here at the
Library, we use a quality management system called
DICE (Digital Imaging Conformance Evaluation),
which the Library has been perfecting for many
years with the assistance of Image Science
Associates. This tool provides assurance that
images obtained from any scanner over any amount
of time are interchangeable. DICE is the existing
standard for image quality management, and it is the
conformance analysis component of the Federal
Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI),
which is used by Federal Agencies, Libraries,
Archives, and Museums around the world.
See the guidelines on our website:
http://digitizationguidelines.gov
The Geography and Map Division of the Library of
Congress scans every object with an object level target.
(Example shown above.)
Scanners and cameras are calibrated using the standard reference ColorChecker
target (left) and the accuracy of the calibration is verified with the DICE Target (right).
My Task
My project involves helping Dr. Lei He,
the Library’s Imaging Scientist, develop
the next generation of DICE.
Specifically, I am working on the color
accuracy module of the software, which
evaluates how well a scanner captures
the true colors of an object. This must
be compatible with the original DICE
program and conform to international
standards.
Contact Liz Pieri
Email: egp2380@rit.edu
Phone: 315-727-7836