Digitisation

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OVERVIEW

A digitisation project can cover a wide range of complex activities and it is often easy to lose track of the underlying project aims and objectives. Digitisation is a tool and not a purpose and should always be used to facilitate the end result of the project rather than becoming the sole focus of it. Careful planning of the processes of digitising materials at the start of the work and conducting a pilot study to identify anything that needs changing will mean that routines should run smoothly. Different formats, whether still or moving images, text or audio, will require different approaches. This article provides a starting point and offers links to expert advice and guidance.

Creating digital materials

Introduction

Make It Digital

Unless digital content is being created for one-time use and will be discarded, good practice should be to design and format your content for different environments and uses over time, even if they are not immediately known. The ability to re-format and re-purpose are key strengths of digital content given how easily it can be copied and distributed. The choices you make at the point of creation, in particular the format that your content is created in, greatly affects how useful and long-lived your content will be.

How digital content changes the game

Digital technologies are sometimes said to be ‘disruptive’ technologies because of the way they challenge or alter long-standing practices. Rapid growth in affordable digital imaging, software and storage has made entry into publishing, photography, and audio and video production possible without any professional training or background. That same technology has for the first time made possible mass-digitisation projects driven by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

A consequence of this rapid change has been a disruption to the development of agreed practices and standards designed to ensure the outputs of these technologies would be long-lived. In fields such as text and digital audio, the practices and standards are relatively mature due to the relative maturity of the technologies used. In photography and image scanning, technology has only recently reached a point of maturity where practices and standards can be consistently applied. In digital video, the technology at present is evolving faster than consistent practice and standards, resulting in a mixture of formats and standards in common use, and ongoing issues with the huge storage requirements for high resolution video.

Following best practice

If your business or content creation activity depends on having content that can be used over a reasonable period of time, you need to anticipate that some technologies and standards will become obsolete. If you are looking for good or best practice, you also need to refer to guidance that is current and addresses recent developments. To achieve this, look for technology hardware and software that uses open standards and for guidance on best practice that is being maintained and has been updated within the last three years.

Good sources of best practice advice can often be found on websites of professional associations, or organisations that specialise in long-term management or storage of digital content (such as libraries and archives). Often this advice however is aimed at professionals using some of the highest quality hardware and software available. If these benchmarks for equipment, training and standards are beyond your reach, that does not mean there is no point in trying to follow them. You will find that the most useful guidance identifies minimum standards and practices, while also pointing to the best practice. Minimum standards and practices are a really good place to start.

Digital format standards

A wide variety of content creation standards exist covering photographs, images, text, moving image and sound. Standards also differ depending on whether the content is digitised or born digital. Many are proprietary, controlled by private or commercial interests, while others are not well supported. Sorting through which digital format standards to use can be challenging, as the choices made at the point of creation strongly determines its future usability.

We recommend digital format standards that follow these principles:

Quality: A good format is lossless (retains all the information captured) and creates an accurate version that is flexible for future re-use.
Interoperable: A good format can be used by different software and hardware platforms and migrated to different carriers over time.
Widely supported: A good format follows a widely supported open or industry standard.
Self-contained: A good format supports a unique identifier and the ability to embed metadata according to a standard metadata schema.

Continued usability in different environments and contexts is central to good practice, and all standards where possible should support this.

The section Creating Digital Materials is taken from Make It Digital and is licenced for use under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 3.0 New Zealand License

For detailed advice and guidance, consult JISC Digital Media

Areas of activity for successful digitisation

Before any digitisation can take place, preparation activities should include the following:

ensuring funding is available
how the project will be managed
an audit of the content to be digitised to identify physical state, size, material types and any special treatment needed before digitisation can happen
whether there are anyIPR and licensing issues
an estimate of the costs of the work
deciding whether to do the work in house or to contract out
identifying the equipment needed and staff to operate it
the processes and technical standards for digital master creation and preservation

The IMLS/NISO Framework of Guidance for building good digital collections also sets out the following six principles for the creation of digital objects:

A good object exists in a format that supports its intended current and future use.
A good object is preservable
A good object is meaningful and useful outside of its local context
A good object will be named with a persistent, globally unique identifier that can be resolved to the current address of the object
A good object can be authenticated
A good object has associated metadata

Sources of advice and guidance

Detailed advice and guidance is available from good practice guides including:

UKOLN Good Practice Guide
JISC Digital Media, in particular their
- overview of materials and
- specific advice on different formats.
Make It Digital, in particular, their guides on the following formats:
The Objects chapter of the NISO/IMLS Framework of Guidance for building good digital collections
The IPR and licencing toolkit for all apects of IPR and digitisation

Further information

King's College, University of London Digital Consultancy Services

MINERVA cost reduction in digitisation, 2006

Renaissance East Midlands Digitisation Guide for Museums

Collections Trust. Cost of Digitising Europe's Cultural Heritage

Collections Trust. Managing the Digital Supply Chain: a position paper

Linked information

Digital Content Supply Chain Model: This short briefing paper has been produced to inform the scoping of a new joint MLA/Collections Trust project to develop a Supply Chain model for Digital Cultural Content. This comment is publish [?]
Europeana Open Culture Conference: Europeana Open Culture 2010 conference will focus on how museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly [?]
Good Practice Guide for Developers of Cultural Heritage Web Services: A UKOLN resource focussing on the issues associated with income generation and sustainability for digitisation projects. [?]
A Simple Guide to Digitisation for Museums: Produced by Renaissance East Midlands, this simple guide is arguably the closest thing to an entry-level document for managers, curators and practitioners thinking about Digitising their collections a [?]
Family photography going digital: 'Family Photography Going Digital', a paper by Gillian Rose. Looks at family snaps, thinks about the importance of family photos and considers how they construct notions of home and family. Notes tha [?]
Digitisation: A Collections Trust factsheet. Defines digitisation and the digital life cycle; describes how digitisation works and how to choose equipment types; advice on whether to digitise in-house or outsource [?]
Managing the Digitisation of Library, Archive and Museum Materials: A National Preservation Office leaflet on the management of the digitisation process, of digitisation projects, and of digital image archives [?]
Deciding to Digitise: Factsheet exploring reasons to digitise, preparing a feasibility study of user needs and addressing issues of resourcing. [?]
Digitisation Standards: A new, open network for people work in the UK and internationally on standards for Digitisation. This network will act as a sounding-board for a programme of work, led by the Collections Trust and [?]
Copyright and the Web: This course provides an overview of the copyright and related rights issues associated with the web, Web 2.0 and the digitisation of collections. It offers basic and practical training, giving partici [?]
Report to the EC on Digitisation and Digital Preservation in the UK: Every two years, each EU Member State has to report to the European Commission describing their progress against a set of Recommendations for Digitisation, Digital Preservation and online accesibility [?]
Digital Media Restoration: Analogue media deteriorates at an alarming rate and few digitisation projects can hope to retrieve great signals from aged collections. In order to archive maximum usefulness some basic digital remast [?]
National Railway Museum Photograph Documentation: Case Study: National Railway Museum Documentation. Retrospective documentation improved storage options and access to 1.5 million images collected over 20 years. A hierarchical methodology overcame ar [?]
Consultation Responses: The Collections Trust is regularly invited to submit responses to key consultations and policy agendas. We provide these responses on the basis of promoting the best interests of the UK Collectio [?]
What we do: The Collections Trust campaigns for the public right to access and engage with Collections. We do this by: Promoting Best Practice Encouraging Innovation [?]
Media Equation Pty Ltd: Media Equation Pty Ltd (me?) is an innovative digital asset management company, providing cultural institutions, publishers and corporations with practical and cost effective solutions. Our core competencies are in archival collection management, digital asset management, rights management and image and video distribution. me? business and software analysts, web developers and programmers are ably backed by technical support, marketing, customer service and business administration experts. me? has the philosophy that it shall remain a market leader by providing innovative and cost-effective solutions and outstanding customer service. [?]
Collect: The Collections Management Exhibition: Collect: The Collections Management Exhibition Date: 28 June 2010 Opening times: 10.00am - 4.00pm Venue: Kingsw [?]

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[[Role::technical support]] [[Goal::managing]] [[Goal::project]] [[Goal::deciding]] [[Goal::advice]] 
[[Goal::digitising]] [[Goal::sound]] [[Goal::video]] [[Goal::photographs]] 
[[Level::basic]] [[Level::medium]] [[Level::deep]]

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