4 Nov
2006
this blog
about
site use
contact
archive
2006
earlier
related
sites
Caslon
Ketupa
|
Offshoring
Among the blizzard of spam hitting the inboxes today was a
'Data Digitisation Business Proposal' from an enterprise in
Chennai, one of those places where the grasp of English syntax
might be deficient but the fingers are nimble and cheap.
The business boasts a guaranteed "accuracy of 99.999%",
fast turnaround and "data entry rates that are under
1/3rd the prevailing costs". Just the thing if you want
to ship a library offshore for data capture.
"Reuben", otherwise unidentified, ends his spam
by noting that it "is confidential and may contain legally
privileged and/or confidential information", so of course
if it has been received in error "please delete it from
your system, do not use, copy or disclose the information
in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender
immediately".
Questions about the difficulties of cross-cultural communication,
aside, we note that the organisation's achievements are claimed
to include -
1.
We have been chosen by the British Library to convert 0.8
Million Union Catalogue of Books to MARC21 exchange data.
2. We have been chosen by the United Kingdom Parliament
to digitize 3000 volumes of the UK Parliamentary Debates
The Hansard nearly 2.20 million pages from 1803 to be converted
to XML.
3. We are currently digitizing 20,000 pages of Finding Aids
in EAD format.
4. We have been chosen by GROS Scotland to index 10 million
Old Parish Registrar of births & marriages records from
images.
5. We have been chosen by GROS Scotland to digitize manuscript
of the Court of Arms in Scotland an official copy of every
Court of Arms granted in Scotland since 1672. ... implemented
a powerful XML database to search their records.
6. We have been chosen by Ireland to digitize around 12
million births, marriages & death indexes from original
printed material.
7. We have digitized several books for Victoria University,
NZ.
8. We have converted several million New Zealand whitepage
records.
9. We are currently digitizing 80,000 pages for NZ Standards.
10. We have created a database of more than 1.0 million
records for a library in the Netherlands.
11. We have created a database of 2.5 million telephone
subscribers for a Spanish company.
12. We process 30,000 POD documents per day for an Australian
courier company and return the data back in 4 hours.
13. We process around 40,000 forms per day for an Italian
company managing customer loyalty programs.
14. We have converted 127 years of a Harvard University
newspaper to XML version for web enabling.
15. We have converted 80 years of data from UK Statutory
Instrument books to XML.
16. We are converting 3000 Texts of Wright American Fiction
to XML for a consortium of libraries headed by Indiana University.
The
nice folk at Yogam Garden, Valasaravakkam, thus have have
an electronic copy of information regarding several million
phone subscribers - current or otherwise - and perhaps the
same number of files on courier company clients and participants
in customer loyalty programs.
The adequacy of Indian statute law, common law and practice
in handling problems regarding unauthorised
dissemination or use of that data is unclear. Problems relating
to the Harvard Crimson or "Wright American Fiction"
are arguably less of a concern than those relating to 'frequent
flyer' schemes.
::
|
recent
entries
auDA
Spooks
Labour
Scents
Spam
Fibre
Fever
Extradition
Privacy
DRM
Domains
|
