Data entry services

Tender description

National Library of Scotland ‘the Purchaser’ wish to award a single service provider contract for the provision of music retroconversion keyboarding services. As part of the 2015-2020 Library Strategy the National Library of Scotland ‘the Library’ has committed to improving access to the library’s collections. By 2025 the library aims to have completed a full listing of the Library’s holdings and have a third in digital format. As part of this commitment the Library has digitised the music card catalogues, as the basis for converting them into online bibliographic records. There are approximately 340 000 records within the music card catalogues, the collection as a whole is made up of a number of different finding aids with the individual records ranging in age from the 1 800s onwards. The first stage of this process has already been procured and is completed. This involved the secure transportation and scanning of the entire card collection, which was being arranged, transported and scanned in batches. The second stage of this process — and which this procurement relates to — is the transcribing of the information from the scanned images into a database via a web form which will allow the library to ingest the data into the Library’s online catalogue. The level of risk associated with this second stage is considerably lower as it will not include the transportation of original documents, the scanned images will be provided electronically. The Library has a requirement to place a contract with an external service provider for the provision of this data transcription exercise. There is an interdependency with the third phase of the overall project during which the Library will recruit editing staff to work on checking and editing the data produced by the transcribers prior to ingest into the Library’s online catalogue. This phase will start soon after this keyboarding contract starts and the work will run in tandem.