Digitizing Your Documents

PLANNING FOR DIGITIZATION

Digitizing Your Documents

Plan, Plan, Plan Define your goals

What do you own?

Why do you want to digitize it?

Who will use your collection?

Will You?

Build your collection alone? Work with others?

Do You Have

Available funding for digitizing your collections?

Trained staff?

Equipment and server storage?

Process for managing digitization ?

Funding

Is your funding -

Adequate to meet your goals?

Sustainable over time?

Staffing

Are your staff or students trained to-

Create accessible quality digital images?

Preserve digital images for the long term?

Will You be Able to

Train new staff or students?

Allocate funds for training?

Share the work with others?

Equipment and File Storage

What are your long term digitization plans? Digitize once or twice a year?Large annual digitization projects?

What formats do you plan to digitize?Text documents?Photographs?Maps?

Equipment

Initial costs

Recurring costs

Consider other options

Digital Storage and Preservation

Where will your digital images live?

How will your users access them?

How will you preserve them?

Managing the Digitization Process

Have you created workflows for your digitization work?

How do you plan to monitor the work and track progress?

Reasons to Record Your Work

Money

Reports/Accountability

Planning

Let’s stop and review …

Your digital project plan is complete

You know where the digital images will live

You know the importance of managing the digitization process

You’re Ready-What’s Next?

More Planning

Policies

Procedures

Workflows

Policies

You will benefit from having policies for- What should be digitized

How it will be digitized

Where the digitized images will live

Additional Policies

Equipment use

Care and handling

Digital image creation

Master image access

Document Your Best Practices

Digital image creation

Quality control review

Preservation

Examples of Standards/Best Practices

Standards Related to Digital Imaging of Pictorial Materials-www.loc.gov/rr/print/tp/DigitizationStandardsPictorial.pdf

Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices - http://www.bcr.org/cdp/best/digital-imaging-bp.pdf

California Digital Library – Guidelines for Digital Objects -http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/guidelines/GDO.pdf.

Record and Track Your Work

Project requests

Project deadlines

Project progress

One Suggestion

Create a digitization request form that includes:

The number of images The format The deliverables requiredThe deadline

Now you are ready to begin

Digital Scanning

Create images following your best practices guidelines

Follow the maxim to scan once

Follow any special instructions when handling fragile materials

Quality Control Review

Follow your best practices guidelines

Review the initial request

Inspect images for machine and human scanning errors

Rescan, if necessary

Digital Content Management

And finally-

Who will manage the digital images over time?

Additional Information

http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/

http://www.bcr.org/cdp/best/digital-imaging-bp.pdf

http://lib.colostate.edu/repository/

Please contact us if you have any questions

Thank you

Beth Oehlerts, Metadata Management LibrarianBeth.Oehlerts@colostate.edu / 491-1827