Goobi is the most popular open-source workflow management software for use in digitisation projects. It covers the entire spectrum of tasks involved in the digitisation process – from book to online presentation. Many libraries, museums, archives, publishers and even scanning companies in Europe have already adopted the software. We'd like to invite you, too, to join the growing Goobi user community.
We believe it should be the nature of the project itself that determines how you work, not the limitations of your software. Thanks to Goobi, there are no restrictions on the way you collaborate with other project members. The software also facilitates the transparent supply of materials such as scanned images or OCR results from different sources or from external service providers and allows you to keep a clear overview of even the most complex workflows containing many individual steps and distributed over a number of sites.
Workflows can be very straightforward – as long as you have the right software. Even very modest digitisation projects have their own peculiarities, and even very small organisations do not use the same approach for all materials. Different projects have different objectives and require a different methodology. Workflow software designed specifically for digitisation projects not only ensures that you keep a clear overview; it also improves the quality of your results and at the same time boosts your productivity, even if your projects involves thousands of individual steps.
Goobi is an open-source software application for digitisation projects. It allows you to model, manage and supervise freely definable production processes and is used on a daily basis by many institutions to handle all the steps involved in creating a digital library. These include importing data from library catalogues, scanning and content-based indexing and the digital presentation and delivery of results in popular standardised formats.
Development work on Goobi began in libraries in 2004. The main focus in the library environment is on large-scale digitisation. Over the first four years (2004-2008), Goobi's development was led by Göttingen State and University Library within the framework of international digitisation projects sponsored by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Intranda GmbH took over the task of developing the software in 2008. Goobi comes under the GPL open-source licence.
As you would expect, since Goobi is a German software project, its use is most widespread in Germany. Apart from museums and archives, its main area of application is in university libraries. The digitisation programmes involved vary in size from quite modest projects at smaller institutions to large-scale digitisation at major Germany university libraries. Since 2008, interest in Goobi has also grown strongly outside Germany. Thanks to its tremendous flexibility and systematic multilingual design, Goobi is now in regular and productive use coordinating digitisation project workflows at a number of centres outside Germany (e.g. Austria, the UK and Spain).
The task of organising individual and complex digitisation workflows places extremely high and varying demands on the software. The approach followed by Goobi allows you to incorporate an enormous range of site-specific factors. On the basis of the workflows compiled at the beginning of the project, you can ensure that all the texts you wish to digitise follow the same workflow. This means that each process can be specified in advance and guarantees that your output meets defined quality standards. An intuitive user interface allows the project manger to specify each step of the project and to integrate mandatory testing routines into the workflow with a view to validating the results of each step as quickly as possible. This avoids time-consuming correction loops and a considerable manual effort. Goobi also lets you automate repetitive manual tasks for greater consistency and accuracy. As a result, each volume can pass through the entire workflow much more rapidly than is the case using manual digitisation techniques.
As it has been designed principally for use in libraries, Goobi has to meet enormously varied requirements while remaining as user-friendly as possible. It also needs to allow for simultaneous multiple use at a number of centres. As a multilingual web-based application, Goobi meets all these requirements. The following pages provide a detailed description of Goobi's functions and how they can help you coordinate your digitisation projects in a clear and organised way. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We will be delighted to explain everything in detail and at your own pace.