The ingest component is intended to provide a facility whereby library personel may digitize and format new items for their collections, and reformat previously digitized items into a more appropriate form. We also believe that an important function of this component should be to add meta-information concerning new items to the system catalogue. Of central importance in the adequate functioning of the proposed system is an appropriate organization of the information that is captured and stored in the database of the system and an appropriate representation of the information. With respect to the first issue, we are proposing a logical organization of this data that is given in terms of the data model that is presented below in Section 1.9; with respect to the second issue, we are proposing a hierarchical yet non-lossy representation of the image data in terms of orthogonal wavelets, and processing the image data to extract image features to be used for indexing purposes.
The basic strategy for designing and developmenting the ingest component involves the acquisition of high-performance scanners for basic digitization, and off-the-shelf support for the scanners. We do not feel that it is important for us to address research issues with respect to fundamental data capture. We will, however, focus significant attention on the preprocessing of newly digitized and previously digitized information in order to prepare data for permanent storage in a format that is optimal for search, browse and retrieval. Other important foci for our activity involves the extraction of metadata from the information and the organizion of the data according to our data model. In the following we focus on image data storage using wavelet decomposition. Issues related to image feature extraction for indexing and metadata creation are discussed in more detail in Section 1.9.