SOW_NIHLM2015484.docx

Historical Journal Scanning SOW

Statement of Work Article Level Historical Journal Scanning and XML Preparation for PubMed Central

National Library of Medicine Bethesda, Maryland 20894

Contents

A. Background The National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland, is seeking assistance with a project to be awarded under a competitive solicitation. The purpose of the project is to perform scanning of an identified set of biomedical journals from their earliest date of publication forward to a specified end date. These scanned journal images will be added to NLM’s PubMed Central Database and will initially comprise approximately 770,000 pages but may extend in phases to 1.5 million pages. The scope of the project is to scan journals from NLM’s own collections to the article level, capture bibliographic citation data (XML) for each article, produce full article text (OCR), create article level PDF files, and produce full page images of each page (TIFF).

PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature, developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine. PubMed Central is a free and unrestricted database, which serves to preserve and maintain open access to the electronic literature. NLM completed an earlier effort to digitize backfiles of significant biomedical journal titles in 2010. Information about the previous project may be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/scanning/. This new project represents a similar effort.

More information about PubMed Central may be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/

B. Task Description Summary of Work There are ten basic steps associated with completing the work of this proposed project: The details of each step are included in the Image Specifications and Functional Requirements for Citation Capture, dated September, 2014 (“Appendix I”). A summary reference to Appendix I is included with several of the eight steps, below. However, other sections of Appendix I may be relevant and the contractor is expected to have a thorough understanding of all technical requirements for the project (See SOW Sect. D, “Technical Instructions”):

1. Pick up of materials in batched shipments from the National Library of Medicine.

a. The materials provided will be original hardcopy journals. Most of them will be bound with hard covers, though some may be single issues with soft covers.

b. The contractor will arrange for pick up of materials, which will be boxed and labeled for shipment by NLM staff. Shipments will vary in size, but the contractor will be notified how many boxes are included in a shipment before they come for pickup. NLM will provide both an electronic and paper packing list describing the contents of each shipment to the contractor. See SOW Sect. E, Logistics – Pick-Up and Delivery of Materials.

2. Verify the shipment contents against the customer-supplied packing list and ensure that every volume and issue is present. The contractor will follow customer-specified procedures related to reporting missing issues against the packing list (See Appendix I, Sect. 1.7 and Sect. 2.4).

3. Prepare an inventory of the customer-supplied source material. (See Appendix I, Sect. 2.2 – 2.3)

4. Scan each journal page on a high-quality, industry standard scanner to produce a 400-ppi 24-bit color TIFF. Follow instructions in Appendix I for all scanning tasks, in particular Appendix I, Sect. 5, “Target Database: General Specifications” and Appendix I, Sect. 6, “Target Database: Image Specifications”. The contractor will make every effort to produce journal page scans without inflicting further damage to old, brittle volumes and will communicate with the customer when or if the contractor believes it is impossible to scan a volume without damaging the volume.

5. Create a separate directory for each article that contains all the associated files for the article. When a page contains more than one article, include a copy of the TIFF file for that page in the directory for each article. Use a consistent naming scheme for all files based on the journal, volume/issue, and page number and a suffix (*.tif, *.txt) identifying the type of file –TIFF or ASCII text. When a page contains more than one article, add an alphabetic suffix to the page number (e.g., 124a, 123b) to differentiate between articles. (See Appendix I, Sect. 5.6 - 5.7).

6. Create an OCR’ed ASCII text file for each article. (See Appendix I, Sect. 5.4).

7. Create a PDF file for each article. (See Appendix I, Sect. 6.11).

8. Create XML files for each article with the exception of those listed on the Exclusion List. (See Appendix I, Sect. 5.5 and Sect. 7).

9. Deliver all files to NLM by FTP, organized by journal/volume/issue/article. (See Appendix I , Sect. 1.8).

10. Rework: Batches that have been delivered to the NLM that are rejected due to quality issues will be rescanned and re-delivered by the contractor without charge. (See Quality Control, Sect. F, below).

C. Body of Work to Scan Attached to this document, in Appendix II, is a spreadsheet listing the initial journal titles to be scanned for this project. Several of these titles are (or once were) indexed for MEDLINE, NLM’s premier bibliographic database that contains over 11 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. The list includes title variations for many journals. Each version of a title is listed separately for the purpose of tracking and handling. Example: British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review and Medical Quarterly Review are the titles of the same journal at different times in the journal’s publication history and both have entries with different dates of publication.

The contractor may refer to either the inventory packing list or the journal style guides to detect the exact range of dates to scan, regardless of the begin and end dates of the entire publication.

Appendix III is a short description of the columns listed on the journal title spreadsheet, some of which are of no concern to the vendor, but provide useful information to NLM. The vendor will want to take note of the Title, Notes, and First/last issue columns in order to make crosschecks against the journals supplied.

D. Technical Instructions Three documents contain the customer’s instructions and overall technical specifications:

(1) Image Specifications and Functional Requirements for Citation Capture (Appendix I), containing all requirements for image capture, article identification and citations creation for the materials to be scanned;

(2) Journal style guides containing individual instructions for specific journal titles (Appendix IV for sample and Appendix I, App. A, “Journal Style Guides”); and

(3) Exclusion List, an XML file of citations to articles that the customer already had article metadata for, (See Appendix I, Sect. 1.7).

In the event that a conflict arises regarding the customer’s instructions represented by these three documents, the contractor will follow this hierarchy to resolve the conflict (See Appendix I, Sect. 5.1):

1. First, Journal style guide for the specific title being scanned;

2. Second, Exclusion List, and;

3. Third, Image Specifications and Functional Requirements for Citation Capture (Appendix I).

E. Logistics

1. All work shall be performed on the contractor’s premises.

2. Transport of NLM source materials will be arranged at the contractor’s expense.

2. Most source materials will come from NLM’s own collection and will have been reviewed for completeness and usability for scanning. They will be collated, boxed and labeled for contractor pickup. The materials will be supplied to the vendor in numbered batches or shipments. Each shipment will include a packing list of the contents, with volume/part/year data, the total number of volumes or issues, and an estimate of the total pages in each item. If, in the collation process, NLM staff find that issues or pages are missing, those will be so noted in the packing list. NLM will also provide the contractor with an electronic copy of the packing list.

3. The contractor will pick up the materials on pre-arranged dates from a specified location at NLM, between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday. It is the responsibility of the contractor to provide insurance covering any damage to or loss of the source material that might occur in shipment or at the contractor facility such as water and humidity damage, physical damage from being dropped or mishandled, or loss from misplacement in the amount of $350,000.00.

4. The contractor shall provide a secure, environmentally appropriate area to store the source materials while they are being transported and scanned (See Appendix I, Sect. 1.4). All source material should be returned to the NLM within 5 days of delivery of the electronic files associated with those materials.

F. Quality Control

1. The following Quality Control Criteria shall be applied by NLM in the review and acceptance of scanned images and XML. See Appendix I, Sect. 3, “Quality Assurance” for further details:

Criteria (per sample)

· Incorrect application of XML element

· Includes incorrect article type assigned as defined in specifications and procedures outlined in Section 7.2.1.1 99.95%

· XML not valid per DTD

· XML not valid per Schematron 100%

· Image skewed on visual inspection

· Image not consistent with source (e.g., inconsistent boundaries, pixilation, distortion, lack of sharpness and detail, etc) 99%

5A

Inventory error

· Missing or duplicate file (XML, OCR, image, etc)

· Citation not created for non-excluded item

· Images not sequenced in “reading order”

· PDF exceeds 60-page limit

· PDF is not Section 508-compliant

· OCR text does not correspond to article boundary

· Individual figure delivered as multiple images 100%

· Article boundaries do not conform to specifications and procedures outlined in this document, Exclusion List or Style Guide, whichever is applicable

· Incorrect article type assigned as per specifications and procedures outlined in Section 5.2 – i.e. page types 99.5%

2. Inaccuracies in labeling scanned image files and or deliverable files greater than 1% will be considered unacceptable and may be returned to the contractor for rework.

G. Standards of Performance

1. All specifications and requirements in the Statement of Work are met.

2. Source materials flow smoothly between NLM and the contractor scanning work sites in a timely fashion.

a. Routine questions are resolved without assistance from the Contracting Officer’s Representative at NLM.

3. NLM is kept informed of problems; new procedures are approved by NLM before they are implemented.

a. The contractor makes thoughtful, well-informed suggestions for solving workflow and procedural problems.

b. The contractor makes every reasonable effort to resolve problems promptly so as to minimize contacts with NLM regarding procedural problems.

4. Risk of damage to NLM provided source material is reduced as much as possible.

5. All completed deliverables meet all technical and physical requirements.

a. The contractor follows all technical specifications as provided in the Statement of Work and Appendices.

b. The contractor identifies and corrects all errors before deliverables are sent to NLM.

c. All boxes containing source material returned to NLM are labeled accurately and legibly.

H. Acceptance and Rejection Procedures, Testing Period

1. NLM plans for a period of six months at the beginning of the contract for both parties to test, improve and possibly change technical requirements. Contractor deliveries made during this time that do not meet quality standards will be accepted without penalty and will be paid for, although the contractor will be expected to re-work them until they meet NLM’s quality expectations. After the initial six month period is over, NLM will expect the contractor to routinely meet quality specifications, and re-work batches without charge.

2. Beginning with the first accepted batch in XX, 2015, NLM will produce a status report for every batch upon completion of quality control and review. See Section F above for Quality Control Criteria. These reports will have a final status of either “accepted” or “rejected”. Each report will indicate what problems exist, if any, with the batch.

3. After the first six months of the contract, NLM will have 40 days after receipt of a batch to either accept or reject the contractor’s work. The contractor shall not invoice for any batch until an “accepted” batch status report is delivered for the batch.

I. Key Personnel The contractor shall engage a Project Manager to oversee all contractor work and serve as a primary point of contact between NLM and the contractor. The Project Manager should have at least three years of recent experience in managing library digitization projects. In addition, the Project Manager shall have at least three years supervisory or project management experience.

The COR has the right to evaluate and approve key staff assigned to work on this contract. The COR must be notified of and approve all changes in staffing after the award.

J. Retention Period for Electronic Archive NLM expects the contractor to retain all electronic files created for the project for a period of three months after the final acceptance of each batch.

K. Data, Data Rights, Patents, Copyrights The contractor shall not retain a copy (in any form) of the scanned images once the three month retention period is over. NLM shall be the sole owner of the images and files produced under this contract.

L. Reports

1. Monthly The contractor shall submit a monthly report including a cumulative summary of statistics indicating the status of scanned volumes: Title, number of volumes completed, number of volumes in process, number of files delivered, and delivery date.

The report narrative may include a summary of successes or any problems or issues resolved or unresolved. The report is due the 5th calendar day after the end of each month.

2. Final The contractor shall submit a final report of the work performed for the entire contract period.

M. Appendices:

I. Image Specifications and Functional Requirements for Citation Capture II. Journal Title List III. Journal List Column Explanation IV. Journal Style Guide sample