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Digitizing Collections: Planning

A guide for digitizing collections for access and preservation.

Workflow

  1. Planning 
  2. Selection
  3. Digitizing materials
  4. Processing files, creating master and access files
  5. Metadata creation or re-purposing
  6. Digital preservation of master files
  7. Presentation of access files in an online content management platform

Things to consider in planning

Things to consider in planning

  1. Timeline
  2. Selection
    1. Copyright?
      1. What if any intellectual property rights are connected to the materials?
      2. Do you have the rights to legal creation and dissemination of a digital version?
    2. Conservation?
      1. Do the items need treatment, preparation or special instructions from conservation staff before they can be digitized?
    3. Other access limitations?
      1. Do acquisition agreements limit whether the items can be digitized and made available online?
      2. Are there privacy issue related to the items?
      3. Are there ethical issues that may impact digitization and online availability (religious customs or other circumstances) 
    4. Staff and resources usage
  3. Metadata strategy - can you re purpose existing metadata? Apply metadata at the collection level in batch?

Resources for Planning

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.