The United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP) has announced that its Division of Communication and Public Information (DCPI) recently launched a trailblazing new project to digitise the organisation's books, reference materials and other publications.
The initiative - among the first of its kind in the UN system - is a collaboration between DCPI, which coordinates UNEP's library and publishing services, and the UN Office at Nairobi print shop, and exemplifies the ‘working as one’ slogan long advocated within the UN. The print shop will be providing technical know-how, while the library will see that the scanned documents are searchable and accessible to staff and researchers worldwide.
Some 3,000 books - along with many other publications, some dating back to UNEP's inception in 1972 - will be scanned and archived.
A pilot project involving 20 documents of different varieties is currently underway, with the goal of creating a streamlined, customised workflow to digitize UNEP's collection over the next several years.
The scanned documents will first be captured as PDFs and then added to the UNEP document repository. Scanning also provides the potential to search the contents of documents and convert them to other user-friendly formats. In the future, they could even be published as e-books.
