To Tiff or not to Tiff ...

[Carolyn_Gonzalez_at_AMEDDCS-FSHTX at medcom2.smtplink.amedd.army.mil]

Listeros:

Welp, here I am again, drawing on this list's vast resources of knowledge.

I'm the one who's making that digital library for the Army's Center for
Healthcare Education and Studies in San Antonio, Texas.  I'm at the point in
library development where I'm just about to set up scanning services for the
library.  

I have about 80,000 pages worth of documents to be scanned right off the bat.
Many of the documents are local reports, many are military technical reports
(DTIC), some are journal articles (Don't worry, I'm taking care of the copyright
issue.), some are Baylor theses, ...

I'm currently researching the issue of what form to have the items scanned
into--whether to hold them as TIFFs or PDFs.  From what I've heard, most of the
military digital libraries out there already appear to be holding their
documents in TIFF files.  The TIFFs seem to be held in a homegrown archival
database, or in Excalibur.

This library's documents are going to be physically held in a homegrown database
that's being built by EDS (That's Ross Perot's old company.)  The EDS point man
for San Antonio projects is Bob Pinto, who was the founding Vice President of
Excalibur, so I'm confident they'll do a fine job wiith that part of the
project.  

The documents are not going to be OCR'd, as they many of them have graphs and/or
charts.  The documents won't be keyword searchable at this point, but will each
be cataloged and linked to a bibliographic record in a searchable bib file. 
Hopefully, we'll be using SIRSI's STYLAS bib file.


Anyway, as I said, I'm just starting my research into the TIFF vs. PDF issue. 
I'm aware that it is possible to download free TIFF readers and free PDF readers
from the internet, and that a compressed multi-paged TIFF will take slightly
more space on a server than the same item held as a PDF.  Server space is not a
major issue for me (yet).

The most intriguing comment I've come across in my search thus far came from a
scanning vendor (let's just call him the TIFF-Man).  He said, "Suppose you've
got a platoon leader sitting out in the desert with a lap top who needs to
download and review two or three pages of a document before he goes into battle.
 If the document is PDF'd, he's going to have to sit and wait for that whole
file to download before he can review those few pages he needs--and that might
take too long.  With a TIFF, that platoon leader could download just what he
needs and then go about his business."

Is this technologically possible?  If a document is being held as a multi-paged
TIFF, could a library user simply download a few specific pages of the document
rather than getting the whole thing?

I'll likely be going up to UT at Austin one day early next week to conduct some
more thorough research, but I welcome any comments from this list on the
subject. 

Thanks in advance,

Carolyn Ellis Gonzalez, Librarian
US Army.  Center for Healthcare Education and Studies
Martek Communications, Inc.
3407 NE Parkway, Suite 130
San Antonio, TX  78218-3349

phone:  (210)  221-6514
e-mail:  Carolyn_Gonzalez at medcom1.smtplink.amedd.army.mil