1. The ALTO Editorial
Board: Collaboration
and Cooperation across
Borders
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2. What is ALTO?
Analyzed Layout and Text Object (ALTO) standard is a
XML schema of metadata for describing the layout and
content of physical text resources such as pages of a
book or a newspaper.
ALTO captures technical details of text pages such as
the position of characters, words, paragraphs,
illustrations, footnotes, etc.
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3. Typical METS/
ALTO XML
digital object for
analog print
materials
(books,
newspapers,
magazines)
METS/ALTO Digital Object
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4. Anexampleofwhat
ALTOmakespossible
The Day book. (Chicago, Ill.), 29 Feb. 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of
Congress. <http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1912-02-29/ed-1/seq-26/>
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5. ALTO is a product of the METAe project, a
collaboration of 14 partners Europe and the USA
which began in 2000
Content Conversion Specialists (CCS), one of the
project partners, administered and maintained
the ALTO standard until August 2009
In August 2009 administration and maintenance
was transferred to the ALTO Editorial Board and
the Library of Congress
A Short History of ALTO XML
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6. Board was created in August 2009 at the same
time administration and maintenance of ALTO
XML was transferred to the Library of Congress
Members are from libraries and industry in
Europe, North America, and Singapore
An Even Shorter History of the
ALTO Editorial Board
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7. 7

8. Singapore
Mikkeli
Paris
London
Hamburg
the Hague
Washington DC
Riverside CA
Coronado CA
Board member locations span 16 time zones
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9. Experience with ALTO implementation or tools
Member of international digital library
community
Support from one’s home institution
Ability and interest in developing and fostering
use of ALTO
Commitment to a 2 year (renewable) term
ALTO Board Membership Criteria
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10. Purpose of the
ALTO Editorial Board
The purpose of the ALTO Editorial Board is to
maintain editorial control of ALTO, its XML
schema, and official ALTO documentation.
Additionally, the Board promotes the use of the
standard and endorses best practices in the use of
ALTO as the practices emerge. The ALTO
Editorial Board is representative of important
communities of interest for ALTO.
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11. Board Meetings
Teleconference
Goal: One per month
Practice: Less than one per month
Scheduling
Doodle poll: Too much work
Thursdays at 2pm UTC
Date (which Thursday) for next teleconference is
settled during each teleconference
Face-to-face meetings in conjunction with library
conferences (WLIC and DLF Forum)
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12. Board Meetings
Agenda sent to all board members in advance of
teleconference
One or more board members responsible for each
agenda item
Meetings result in action items with one or more
members responsible for the action item
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13. Board Meetings
Draft agenda for September 19, 2013 ALTO meeting. If you have changes or additions, please email them to everyone as soon as
possible. If you haven't yet adopted a change proposal as its champion, please do so before the meeting.
1. Review action items (see below) [Frederick leads discussion].
2. Review volunteer champions for current change proposals [Frederick leads discussion].
3. Discussion of draft design principles for ALTO [Markus leads discussion].
4. Discussion of Namespace request from Yursa Ibrahim [Nate leads discussion]
5. Jean-Philippe will demonstrate some of the BnF "hacks" (constraints) on the ALTO schema. document (2013-06-04 ALTO
Schema Differences BnF-LoC.docx) describing differences between BnF ALTO schema and Library of Congress ALTO
schema [Jean-Philippe leads discussion].
6. Final discussion of IMPACT proposal to allow shape-element usage (IMPACT-proposal: (1) Allow Shape-element usage)
and Nate's draft document (http://altostandard.pbworks.com/w/file/64537934/2013-03-14%20Impact%20proposal%20-
%20Allow%20Shape%20discussion.doc) [Proposal champion Nate leads discussion].
7. Discuss IMPACT-proposal: (2) Process Result tracking [Proposal champion Joachim leads discussion].
8. Discuss IMPACT-proposal: (3) Logical Labeling Of Structural Elements [Proposal champion Evelien leads discussion].
Action items (also see Action items page)
[Action 2013-06-13] Everyone to review Markus's draft design principles (ALTO schema design guidelines).
[Action 2013-06-13] Joachim will list use cases for the future direction of ALTO: What does ALTO do now and what should it
do in future? Jukka and Evelien will collaborate as they can.
[Action 2013-06-13] Jean-Philippe will demonstrate specific examples of the BnF ALTO schema "hacks".
[Action 2013-06-04] Review Jean-Philippe's document (2013-06-04 ALTO Schema Differences BnF-LoC.docx).
[Action 2013-04-11] Frederick will draft a change proposal for "normalized" coordinates.
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14. Board Teleconferences
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15. Board Teleconferences
X
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16. Board Teleconferences
X ?
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17. ALTO Design Principles
Perfection (in design) is achieved, not
when there is nothing more to add, but
rather when there is nothing left to take
away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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18. ALTO Design Principles
Don’t break backward
compatibility!
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19. ALTO Change Proposals
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20. Graphic from Kaufmann et al. “More than fun and money. Worker Motivation
in Crowdsourcing – A Study on Mechanical Turk.”
Motivation
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21. Graphic from Kaufmann et al. “More than fun and money. Worker Motivation
in Crowdsourcing – A Study on Mechanical Turk.”
Motivation
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22. Motivation
Altruism
Community sharing and
improvement
Recognition
Ego
Creative expression
Wikipedia contributors, "Open-source_movement," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_movement#Motivations_of_Programmers (accessed July 2013).
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23. The Singapore National Library Board (NLB) uses
extensively the ALTO standard for its popular
NewspaperSG service. The ALTO editorial board
provides me the opportunity to meet and work
with members with substantial experience with the
ALTO standard and implementations.
Kia Siang Hock, Singapore National Library
Board, Singapore
Motivation
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24. Bibliotheque nationale de France has used ALTO
from the very beginning of its digitalization
projects, and it now has millions of ALTO pages
available for preservation and diffusion purposes.
ALTO is a great tool used everyday, everywhere.
But ALTO also has a future, and the ALTO board is
the right place to build it.
Jean-Philippe Moreux, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Paris France
Motivation
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25. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) began digitizing
printed material on a large scale around 2005. Shortly
after that ALTO was chosen and is still used as an
important part of the format the KB has designed for
the now many millions of pages digitized material and
growing. In the future we hope that it will also be
possible to improve the quality of the digitized
collection, for example, the quality of the text. For
these reasons the KB as well as I are interested in
helping the community to maintain and develop the
standard.
Evelien Ket, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, den Haag, the
Netherlands
Motivation
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26. • Library of Congress ALTO Reference Page:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/
• ALTO Wiki: http://altostandard.pbworks.com/
w/page/24017357/Home
• ALTO Listserv: http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
wa?SUBED1=alto&A=1
More about ALTO
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27. ? Frederick Zarndt
IFLA Newspapers Section
frederick@frederickzarndt.com
Joachim Bauer
Content Conversion Specialists
j.bauer@content-conversion.com
Jukka Kervinen
National Library of Finland
jukka.kervinen@helsinki.fi
Kia Siang Hock
Singapore National Library Board
siang_hock_kia@nlb.gov.sg
Brian Geiger
University of California Riverside
bgeiger@ucr.edu
Markus Enders
British Library
markus.enders@bl.uk
Nate Trail
Library of Congress
ntra@loc.gov
Evelien Ket
Koninklijke Bibliotheek
evelien.ket@kb.nl
Jean-Philippe Moreux
Bibliotheque nationale de France
jean-philippe.moreux@bnf.fr
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