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- Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices California Digital Library – Guidelines for Digital Objects - ines/GDO.pdfhttp:// ines/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 required The 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 torial/ torial/ bp.pdf bp.pdf Please contact us if you have any questions

Thank you Beth Oehlerts, Metadata Management Librarian /