What is the SEDD Module and how does it works?

The NILDE SEDD built-in Module, including the Digital Hard Copy, is a unique technology which has been implemented by NILDE.

NILDE performs SEDD by the means of a file-uploading/Web-server which accepts the following file-formats only: PDF, JPG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, TIF, BMP, PNG.

The operator selects the digital document from a web form to send it to the receiving library. NILDE saves the file in a web-server disk space, processes it through the Digital Hard Copy procedure (which is only performed on PDF files), then makes available the digital document to the requesting library by the means of the NILDE user-interface. The requesting library needs to authenticate into the NILDE system to view the received document and to print it; the file will be immediately destroyed from the NILDE server, after printing it, or it will be removed after 7 days.

The NILDE Digital Hard Copy is part of the SEDD Module. It processes PDF files only. In fact, many publishers  which allow for SEDD of their electronic material, do not allow to perform it on original PDF files, but only on the printed copy of them. This is to guarantee that a copy used for ILL is a real 'image-copy' that has lost all the peculiar PDF's capabilities on electronic text, such as text search and retrieval, text selection-copy-and-paste, etc... (we call the publisher's original file 'the text PDF'). In this case, the manual operations a librarian has to perform are: to print the PDF; to digitize the printed copy by the means of a scanner, so obtaining a new PDF-image file; to use for SEDD the PDF-image file (we call it 'the hard-copied PDF').

The NILDE digital Hard Copy module emulates those manual operations, implementing a three-steps process:

1. The first step extracts each single page from the text-PDF (INPUT file) and transforms it in a PNG image file. In such a way all the page contents (text, images, etc..) are combined to obtain a single rasterized image, having a fixed resolution of 200 dpi (this is an acceptable compromise between printing/reading quality and the image file size). This also should guarantee that the final document which is sent to the requesting library is not a “perfect” digital copy of the original PDF file, since it has a lower quality.
2. The second step combines all the obtained PNG image files into a new PDF file (OUTPUT file).
3. Finally, a copyright front page is added to the OUTPUT file, containing the bibliographic data, the ILL transaction information (such as the borrowing and lending libraries, the request and supply dates), and a copyright notice. Publisher's licensing information regarding ILL, if a license has been applied by the lending library, will be added soon in the copyright front page.

Such a Digital Hard Copy process, implemented by NILDE, is equivalent to the three-steps manual operations previously mentioned.
Digital Hard Copy limits to: Max input file size (15 MB), Max output file size (30 MB).