Margot Note's Blog, page 13

Descriptive Practices

Digitizing materials requires an investment in describing them to aid users in discovering them. What makes description challenging is the level of detail required. 

Understanding description requires knowledge of recognized standards and the ability to apply them. In addition, description requires multitasking, toggling between high-level philosophical issues such as the inclusiveness of subject terms and a focused eye for detail to troubleshoot data entry issues.

For most projects, already processed collections ease description choices for digitization. A certain amount of description regarding the collection exists. A readymade list of prioritized subject terms, people, and corporate bodies provides details to aid description practices.

Access to analog collections is usually through finding aids, which may only include subject indexing for extensive collections. The most frequent approach to retrieval among various archives is by subject. However, practices vary depending on the repository, the resources available, the size and requirements of the collection, and user needs. The priorities of each institution must be addressed in determining the depth of description required for their holdings.

Item-Level Description

Archivists have often dismissed description at the item level as impractical. However, some have adhered to it, even though it contradicts the traditional archival practice of collection-level description. In addition, item-level description is more common with visual materials than textual materials. Therefore, archivists must evaluate their collections to determine if item-level description is warranted. 

Although time-consuming, item-level description makes materials searchable with digital images without retrieving the originals. However, resources are seldom adequate to index collections at the item level; item-level handling should exist within a group-level description framework. Repositories with limited budgets may digitize a few representative files while noting additional unscanned materials.

Ideally, adequate information should be provided for each file. Therefore, digital resources should be searchable by subject through keywords. Linked item-level records can provide more information and are searchable within and among collections. However, due to the labor involved, linking may be impractical for digitizing initiatives of any significant size.

Although archivists debate the necessity for item-level access, describing materials taken together is often more complex. Collection-level description can be helpful for materials of the same subject but problematic for collections with various subjects, as it neither improves retrieval nor limits handling. Nevertheless, group arrangement and description are necessary for large collections or when resources are limited. 

Users can access collections as a single unit, or when organized intellectually under one classification while being physically stored or electronically displayed in distinct groupings. A coherence that binds the contents together characterizes collections. As a result, a totality enhances the research value of each item beyond what it would have in isolation.

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Finding Aids

Some institutions use MARC records to index subjects for extensive collections through individual collection-level records. The MARC records lead users to a finding aid for more details. Since the finding aids were paper-based and often only available locally at the institution, users would have to view them in person. 

Item-level MARC cataloging was often neither warranted nor feasible. The format and access capabilities of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid, however, offer the possibility of a more flexible alternative. EAD was developed to mark the data contained in finding aids so they can be searched and displayed online. In addition, it promised a more sophisticated way to produce searchable text and provide descriptions to facilitate cross-collection searching. EADs index collections by providing access points at the collection or item level, depending on the institution’s collections, needs, and users. As the tools for accessing finding aids become sophisticated, EADs’ content-specific indexing capabilities make them a helpful resource for standardized, integrated archival access. 

When in Doubt, Choose Dublin Core

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set was designed to be easy to use and less expensive to implement than other complex metadata schemes. Dublin Core arose from discussions at a 1995 workshop sponsored by Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). As the workshop was held in Dublin, Ohio, the element set was named the Dublin Core. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) manages the continuing development of the Dublin Core.

The core set of 15 data elements facilitates discovery. It captures information such as the title, identifier, creator, contributor, publisher, language, description, subject, coverage, date, type, relation, format, source, and rights. No elements are mandatory; all can be repeated and expanded if needed. While Dublin Core metadata serves as a framework, the standard is open to interpretation. The use of the elements may vary among institutions; it focuses on interoperability and international consensus. 

Dublin Core is attractive to archival institutions because of the systems that support it. Dublin Core is Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) compliant, which promotes interoperability by allowing institutions to export their records for inclusion in search services. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Description of Archival Collections

Archivists should increase the number of access points to their materials to help users navigate their collections. 

Description combines traditional archival practices with visual resource communities’ more focused descriptive methods. 

GLAM Description Practices

Libraries catalog books with objective descriptors, such as author, title, publisher, and year. As soon as a library catalogs a book, any library can copy its cataloging and apply it to its holdings. 

On the other hand, museums usually describe the collection first and the individual items second—and group items by creator, media, provenance, or historical period. Description includes genre and style, history and use, and preservation details. Much of the cataloging information at one museum cannot be applied to another work held by a different institution. The attributes and descriptors are subjective. For example, the artist’s name, year of production, and place of origin do not appear alongside the work as in a book. Subjective descriptive methods may lead to different information on the same object. Practices also vary because of the diversity of museums and their collections. 

Archivists create descriptions of unique materials, usually original unpublished material, expressed as item- and collection-level records. Description develops from the information gleaned during acquisition, appraisal, and arrangement, producing preliminary descriptive forms, such as container lists, summarizing the context and content of archival materials, and adding restrictions and access points. Thorough scrutiny of the collections may reveal details to form descriptions. In addition, research about the materials can sometimes inform description, although multiple sources should confirm any details. 

Archival collections often lack preexisting structures, titles, creator names, or other elements. Therefore, it was a natural progression for libraries and archives to use methods to describe archival materials they had already developed to describe books and documents. However, these bibliographic methods do not address the unique characteristics of archival collections. In addition, no method meets the description needs of all archives, libraries, and museums; these differences make searching for materials across institutions challenging. 

A Laborious Practice

Cataloging is knowledge-intensive and time-consuming because the characteristics that make materials valuable make them difficult to describe. Description and retrieval are acts of translation. Despite online catalogs, web-accessible collections, and improved information searching, access to collections has remained limited due to a lack of access and description. 

One assumes that description is adequate before digitization, but this is rarely true. Description often begins, or is improved, as part of the project. Much of the data required for records appears as the originals’ annotations. Therefore, information is assembled from various sources. Since description is not a project’s primary outcome, it is often perfunctory. 

As with other aspects of digital imaging, a digitization initiative’s purpose drives decisions about metadata. Accordingly, archivists evaluate the costs and benefits of creating and maintaining metadata at different levels of granularity. In addition, understanding the collections (and how users view them) enables a more critical evaluation of metadata schemas and a better framework for catalogers.

Standardized Approach to Description

A practical method of selecting and using metadata is creating a set of requirements that best describe the materials. Then, archivists assess the requirements against standards and vocabularies and investigate the approaches to metadata handling of similar collections. This approach ensures files are described to fit their intended purposes, saves time in developing cataloging rules, and ensures that the materials will be interoperable with other collections.

Due to the nature of archival materials, a standardized approach to description is ideal, but compromises must be made. For example, catalogers may not index all files completely, nor can all resources be expended on indexing only a few collections. While description is challenging, archival materials hold a wealth of information that justifies additional efforts to make them accessible. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Quality Control and Post-Production in Digitization Projects

As part of a digitization project, some post-production is necessary to obtain surrogates that match the original’s detail, sharpness, and tonal range. The nature of the project governs the amount of processing required. 

For example, automatic processing is appropriate for homogenous files, whereas manual adjustments may be performed on individual images. 

Institutions should strive to provide faithful reproductions of the originals. Images may be framed to show beyond the originals’ edges when appropriate, rotated, deskewed, or sharpened. These adjustment processes, however, should not be used to overcome the proper equipment operation. 

Color management begins with correct scanner operation and capture time to make the original scan as accurate as possible. Next, the original document should be compared to the image under controlled viewing conditions on a color-controlled monitor. Finally, using software such as Photoshop, the image may be adjusted to match the colors closely. 

File-Naming Practices

Finding and classifying digital images is easier if file naming conventions are followed. Files move through servers and systems during their lifespan. Computers cannot interpret logical relationships in a collection of images. Therefore, these relationships must mirror how the files are named. File-naming conventions help sort like objects together in search results and create persistent URLs for digital surrogates. Archivists should follow conventions when creating file names to ensure consistency and simplify processing. 

Files have unique names and are independent of the location within a directory structure for context. At a minimum, file names should combine information about the item’s location, a unique identifier, and a file type extension. 

Derivative files should have similar file names as their master files, with a usage indicator appended to the item number. Master files require no usage appendage. For example, suppose a digital object consists of multiple files. In that case, each file name must contain the object’s identifier, appended with a unique sequence number containing enough digits to account for all items in the collection. 

Guaranteeing Integrity

Quality control is an essential component in digitization to guarantee integrity. The conditions for quality require the identification of the desired result and production goals. The quality of image capture cannot be any better than the source image of a scan; the source imposes the upper limit on image quality. Therefore, archivists should define acceptable levels of digital image quality based on the attributes of the source, the capability of the digital imaging system used, and the output of the digitization process to be judged against. 

A quality review process is necessary for in-house and outsourced images. In both cases, archivists must ensure that images meet specifications. Contracts with vendors for digitization services include provisions for the re-digitization of images that fail to meet specifications, and institutions contracting with vendors must have a means of identifying these images quickly. When the vendor sends derivative images, they should also be subject to quality review. 

Ideally, quality control should be performed on all master and derivative images. The quality control of image files can be maintained by determining an appropriate percentage of images to check, depending on the project’s size and the scanning technician’s skill. Many projects adopt sampling to reduce the costs of this process, such as checking only 10% of the images. The people other than those performing the digitizing should conduct the quality review process. 

A complete quality review process is no substitute for training and supervision of digitizing staff. It is also only effective if image specifications have been well-defined and tested at the start of the project, based on an understanding of the source material and digital imaging best practices. 

Documenting Efforts

Creating and maintaining digitization documentation takes effort. Documentation conveys the processes behind the construction of digital collections, including project plans, metadata guides, and workflows. It provides benefits in the long run as digital collections are maintained and enhanced. In addition, if digitization projects standardize systems and processes, each new project will require less unique documentation. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Digitization Labor Options

Archives consider both in-house and outsourced labor options for digitization projects. 

In-house implies that the institution captures the images, supplying hardware, software, personnel, and overhead. Outsourcing means hiring a vendor to receive the materials, convert them, and return the originals with digital files. The decision depends on the scope, nature, fragility, and uniqueness of the materials, budget, and resources. 

Weighing Options

Given the cost of scanning and equipment, outsourcing is advantageous because vendors bring their experience from similar projects. Few institutions can keep pace with the latest hardware and software. Vendors maintain the latest equipment and employ specialists.

However, outsourcing labor rather than developing services internally is not always the best solution. Archivists may wish to invest in the space, labor, training, and equipment needed for digitization. Additionally, the institution may invest in developing expertise that other services can leverage. In-house imaging allows for experimentation without technical specifications and contracts. 

Working in-house is appropriate in several situations: when a project is small, if the institution has skilled staff or staff with an incentive to learn, administration support for training, and equipment or funding to acquire it. In addition, the organization positions itself to digitize collections in the future by developing expertise internally.

Hardware, software, and storage systems must be ready in the organization before digitization can begin. Institutions need scanners, cameras, copy stands, and other hardware; a hardware infrastructure; and software for image capture, processing, metadata, and quality control. In addition, the environment should be appropriate to the digitized material, paying attention to light and humidity.

Although outsourcing usually entails transporting materials to vendors outside the institution, some vendors may be able to scan on-site. This option offers the benefits of in-house projects, such as oversight, but providing a work area, security, and insurance will still be required. 

Project Staffing and Steering

Staffing depends on the project’s size and complexity. Training is required unless staff members have experience. Some skills, such as technology use, may be learned while performing tasks. Others, such as handling materials, require advanced training. A small core of personnel is preferred over a larger group that may change its membership frequently.

Staffing for digitization initiatives includes stakeholders with different areas of expertise. For example, a digital project may need a project manager, a curator, a scanning technician, a quality control technician, a cataloger, and a web manager. Responsibilities can be reduced or expanded depending on the project. 

In some institutions, a project steering committee functions as a board, including archivists, catalogers, and subject specialists. An advisory committee offers counsel on the project’s focus and direction. Members can include the steering committee with external appointments bringing areas of expertise to the project. Subcommittees may present more focused technical, academic, or editorial support. The steering committee might consist of leadership members, and the advisory board may include the group and members of the board of directors. 

Advantages of Alliances

Collaboration is often required for local, national, and international initiatives. Partnerships can broaden access to materials, ensure maintenance, create revenue-sharing opportunities, maximize existing resources, and serve as excellent public relations opportunities. 

Working together provides a valuable method for making larger partnerships successful. Taking advantage of the frameworks supporting cooperation and understanding the advantages of alliances builds success. Partnerships should always foster all parties’ missions, visions, and values.

Institutional consanguinity has many benefits, as experienced practitioners share standards and best practices. Collaboration can facilitate knowledge transfer by creating resource-building opportunities. Additionally, staff development opportunities are created by partnering with those who can share their skills. Collaborative initiatives may increase funding opportunities. Many granting agencies encourage partnerships, especially those that provide a basis for shared knowledge. Integrating collections and resources builds reunified, remote collections that have the potential to reach larger audiences and achieve a greater breadth of pedagogical and scholarly goals. Mutual metadata and delivery mechanisms also result in improved resource discovery. Savings from sharing costs may be realized as larger projects can be cost-effective. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Digitization Planning and Cost Projection

Digitization initiatives require strategic planning because they are interrelated tasks in which each decision influences the next. 

In addition, digitization requires management because of the change inherent in these projects, the complex nature of digitization, and the expertise required. Conducting a successful digitization project also necessitates a realistic estimate of direct and indirect costs. As a result, organizations rely on best practices to justify the investments made in digitization projects. 

Project Planning

While planning a project, archivists should understand the institution’s mission, where the project fits into the organization, and assess resources against those that need to be acquired. They also need to establish standards to be adhered to during digitization, begin the documentation process, plan the implementation, and evaluate the project.  

The project’s scope and the collections’ characteristics translate into image-capture specifications and procedures. Evaluating the files to be digitized is part of the planning process, which involves determining the number of records to be digitized; identifying formats, sizes, and conditions; and assessing unusual characteristics. 

The success of digital projects hinges on planning more than technology. Technology should never drive projects; archivists should determine user needs first, then select technology to meet these requirements. 

Considering Costs

Digitization projects are a unique and often unprecedented expense, usually in response to a new funding opportunity. They should not be compared to or substituted for existing activities and expenses. Every step in a digitization project involves human intervention, and these costs are unlikely to be reduced. 

Project planning must consider start-up and infrastructural costs. These include the selection, preparation, and conservation of the materials; metadata creation; digitization costs, including the purchase of vendor services or hardware, software, and peripheral equipment; quality control; technical infrastructure maintenance, including hardware maintenance and network costs; preservation of images and metadata, including storage costs; rights clearance; labor costs, including technical support, project management, web programming, and interface design staff, and training; user evaluation; and documentation.

The most significant expense is cataloging, followed by labor-intensive procedures, such as locating, reviewing, and assembling originals; preparing and tracking them; and quality control. In addition, technology has a short life cycle, which means expenditure on replacing systems and investment required for staff to learn the latest systems and applications. 

Plans to digitize collections consider the changes this endeavor will bring to the institution. Organizations should acknowledge the continuing benefits of temporary cost increases for training and equipment at the outset. While equipment costs often draw attention to those managing budgets, support expenses are usually more significant. In addition, technology turnovers require migration and upgrades. If an institution is to transition to a digital environment, it must learn how to allocate resources.

Pilot Projects

A cost-benefit analysis assesses the relationship between functionality, demand, and expenses. Unfortunately, figures related to project expenditures are often misleading. For example, although storage and processing power prices continue to fall, most budget projections extrapolate from available information about current price structures. In addition, analyses often fail to account for efforts that, were they included, would alter calculations, such as document preparation, indexing, metadata creation, post-scanning processing, and file management. 

Developing feasibility studies based on actual costs is important because the experience of working with one’s collections is one of the best ways to forecast project costs. Repositories could consider a pilot project to ensure workflow problem resolution before a project’s commencement.

Commitment for Change

Digitization requires an institutional commitment to preservation, technology integration, and digital preservation leadership. Unfortunately, digital sustainability efforts are often pushed aside by more urgent concerns. Regardless of the quality and robustness of the images created by a digitization project, they will not last if the organization cannot support its maintenance. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

How to Avoid Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the practice of falsely representing as one’s own any language, thoughts, ideas, designs, or expression in a paper, exam, or other work. In short, it means taking someone’s else’s work and passing it off as yours. There are severe consequences for plagiarism in your academic, work, and personal lives.

Plagiarism may take many forms. Here are some of the more comment forms that occur in an academic setting:

Copying words or ideas from printed or online sources without citing the sources properly

Copying all or part of another student’s work and passing it off as yours

Buying essays or papers from others and passing them off as your own

What I’ve discovered as an instructor is that there are fewer students who plagiarize purposely. Instead, many students inadvertently plagiarize out of laziness or ignorance. Most of us learn about how to cite and how not to plagiarize in middle school and high school. Most colleges assume that you already know how to cite your sources; grad school definitely assumes that you know. Unfortunately, many students’ knowledge in this critical area of scholarly work is spotty. The rigors of academic work can cause students to slip a bit in their citations, assuming that no one will notice. Or they are working so quickly that they don't remember what idea came from where. Students not only cheat themselves out of the benefits of their education, but they also set themselves up for a lot of trouble. Professors such as myself try to put the fear of God into our students to help them avoid this unnecessary heartache!

What Do You Need to Cite?

When you use someone else’s words and phrases in your work, you must enclose them in quotation marks and give the writer credit by citing your source. For instructors, it is easy to identify writing styles that don’t sound like the rest of your work. 

When you use someone else’s ideas or original research in your work, you must cite the source. In this case, paraphrase. When you paraphrase, you restate someone else’s ideas in your own words. Although the words are your own, the ideas aren’t, so you still need to cite them. When you're in doubt, cite. 

Keep careful notes as you do research, including where ideas came from so that you can easily cite the material in your paper. I cannot emphasize this enough; the minute it takes to record your citation will save you minutes and hours later on. Be kind to your future self and take good notes in the present. 

Also read and understand your school’s academic integrity policy, as well as your instructors' policies if they have them. Ensure that you are not inadvertently doing something that would cause concern with your work.

What Don’t You Need to Cite?

If the piece of information you want to use is considered common knowledge, you do not have to cite it. Will an average reader accept the statement as reliable without having to look it up?

To decide whether information could be considered common knowledge, ask yourself the following questions

Who is my audience?

What can I assume they already know?

Will I be asked where I obtained my information?

Information that most people know or are shared by members of a certain field or cultural or national group is considered common knowledge. If you are writing to an audience outside of these groups, the information may not be deemed common knowledge. 

If you have questions about if something is regarded as common knowledge in your field, ask your instructor.

 

Selection Criteria for Digitization

A selection policy is a core component of a digital project. Archivists must validate their selection procedures for digitization, especially with the increase in collaborations for digital projects. 

Additionally, funding is most likely available where proposed digitization programs meet agreed criteria regarding preparation, selection, and image capture. Since only a small percentage of a collection can be digitized, archivists must determine what is most worthwhile. Aesthetic, evidential, informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values—as well as indicators unique to the digital realm, influence selection.

Copyright Status

Copyright status is the most critical selection criterion for digitization. Records that are candidates for digitization should be in the public domain or have their copyright held by the institution. If not, archivists should obtain permission to digitize from the rights holder. If the institution lacks the right to digitize, it should choose other records. 

Archivists should investigate donor restrictions to determine if the records can be digitally captured and presented online. Digitization performed without thoughtful selection creates digital files that are limited in usage because of legal restrictions. Determining the legal status of materials is crucial in any digital selection process. If institutions have materials encumbered by an onerous permissions process, it may be expeditious to consider other collections. 

Current and Potential Use

Usage is another factor that determines a collection’s priority for digitization. Selected records should support activities, programs, exhibitions, publications, and events and enhance the institution’s strengths. 

If analog records are well used, researchers will likely be interested in their digitized versions. Conversely, underused records may be good candidates for digitization in order to attract new users. Although selection based on use is tenable, doing so limits search results to repeated use of records without context. Archivists must balance digitizing popular records against providing a richer representation of the institution’s holdings. Records hosted online, even if highly used in analog form, are only a subset of the collection. Online aggregations provide a curated and perhaps restrictive view of history rather than a more balanced perspective.

Archivists should evaluate whether appropriate intellectual control can be provided for the originals and their surrogates. In addition, archivists should assess the degree to which the materials are suited for online use, if cataloging and processing are complete, and if resources support metadata creation. 

The Impact of Digitization

Selection should consider technical feasibility, such as the degree to which digital surrogates can represent the originals and whether the images will display accurately. Digitization is ideal for records with restricted access due to their condition, value, vulnerability, and location. Additionally, some collections may be chosen to enhance image quality. 

Partnerships

Requests from potential collaborative or consortial partners influence selection. Digital conversion may encourage new usage between institutions, and collections split among institutions can be united online. Archivists also consider synthesizing various formats, related materials scattered among many locations, and the possibility of developing a critical mass of subject-related records. Making a digitization project meaningful requires a minimum volume of materials. Otherwise, the research value may be too low to attract enough users. An important consideration is whether an entire collection or only part of it will be digitized. The value of records is higher in the aggregate rather than as single items without context.

Other criteria include examining the motives for initiating digitization projects, their supportive institutional framework, and funding opportunities. Finally, no matter what the decisions to convert materials to digital form are, archivists refine the selection process along a continuum requiring reassessment throughout the project. 

Understanding Context

The creation of digital collections relies upon understanding the context and meaning of the physical collection. Research often reveals aspects of a collection that influence digitization. The materials in a collection slated for digitization should be stable, organized to optimize scanning, and have supportive records to facilitate processing. If a collection is not physically ready, organized and documented, or sufficiently understood, digitization should be delayed, regardless of priority status.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Issues to Consider Before Digitization

Prior to archival digitization, archivists should be aware of areas of concern, and remember that different international laws apply to these problematic categories. 

For example, archivists must proceed with caution regarding sensitive content regarding cultural property, anthropological images, or materials related to Native Americans. Additionally, with materials that involve people photographed against their will or in exploitative situations, archivists should be sensitive to the context of how the materials were collected and consider how they will present such content.

Publicity, Privacy, and Restrictions

The right of publicity is associated with public figures. Publicity rights address commercial gain in one’s name, likeness, voice, persona, or other commercial aspects of personality. Laws vary internationally and state by state in the United States. A further complication is that this right may continue in some regions after death, but in others, it ends at the subject’s death.

The right to privacy relates to private citizens, though exceptions exist. Privacy rights are noncommercial and protect people from intrusion into their private affairs and the public disclosure of private information. If the materials are intrusive, the likelihood of obtaining permission from the subject is slim. The right to privacy ends at death. Organizations will have different stances regarding the potential for controversy created by distributing images others could perceive as violating privacy.

Records may have donor restrictions, including limitations stipulated by the donating individual or organization on access to or use of materials. For example, the restrictions may require that portions of a collection be closed for some time or that a credit line is used if the collection’s materials are used. 

Obscenity and pornography are complex areas of law where one must tread carefully. Images including nudity, especially involving children, are problematic.

Archivists should perform digital manipulation on a copy of the unprocessed file. The original file is the standard to which the final image should be compared. Archivists should document deliberate deviations, such as cropping. Institutions may wish to establish a code of ethics for creating, manipulating, and distributing files. A policy will help authenticate image files and establish the institution as a credible source of historical materials. 

Copyright Issues

Copyright provides a limited monopoly permitting authors to profit from their creative efforts and, eventually, for the public to use works such that usage will inspire new creations benefiting society. Therefore, when creative work is not subject to copyright protection, it is referred to as being in the public domain.

Fair use is a legal concept unique to the United States that provides a defense against copyright infringement. It allows users to copy an otherwise protected work without permission from the copyright owner. Some countries have a similar concept called fair dealing, but it is usually more restrictive. Fair use deals with certain kinds of copying that, under specific circumstances, were deemed excusable for public policy reasons. Fair use is only available for limited purposes such as criticism, comment, reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. 

Rights management has significant implications for digitization initiatives. Most institutions select records for digitization in which they own the copyright, or the records have transitioned into the public domain. Institutions may wish to investigate unknown copyrights depending on the available resources. If permissions are unforthcoming, the materials cannot be reproduced, and the project’s focus should change. If there are limited means for investigation, archivists should concentrate on items whose rights are owned by the organization. 

Once digital images are available online, organizations should protect their rights. The ubiquity of the Internet exacerbates copyright and legal issues. The potential for unauthorized use of materials online means that access cannot be managed as carefully as in traditional settings, where access restrictions allow archives to present sensitive materials with commentary, background materials, and guidance.

Access, when not universal, must be managed through passwords, fees, or other means. Institutions can offer various viewing, downloading, and printing capabilities to users. A simple method for protection includes copyright statements and usage guidelines. For example, users agree to abide by the rules on a website before viewing digital files. Access could also be limited to registered users or users logging on from the institutions’ domain name or IP address. Additionally, institutions may add captions or watermarks, or encrypt the images.

Legal Matters

Institutions should make enterprise-wide decisions on copyright and protections. Archivists should have access to up-to-date information and keep documentation about legal matters relating to their collections. The presentation of material on the Internet is inherently international, so archivists should be aware of the larger context of global access. It is worthwhile, especially with a digitization project, to have legal advice concerning copyright, as the law varies internationally.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Appraisal for Digitization

Selection is an indispensable tool for digitization. Archivists apply their knowledge to selection criteria, matching institutional priorities to their collections, resulting in a representation of history with enduring value.

Appraisal Defined

Appraisal, in an archival context, identifies materials offered to an institution with sufficient value to be accessioned depending on the provenance and content, authenticity and reliability, order and completeness, condition, and intrinsic value. Appraisal assesses materials, balancing their values and usefulness against maintenance and management costs. Selection is crucial because maintaining collections is expensive, and expenses related to digital materials are significant.

Appraisal depends on factors such as mission statements, acquisition criteria, and collecting strategies. Therefore, appraisal policies should be flexible enough to accommodate changing definitions of historical value, encourage consistency, and ensure accountability. 

To determine whether materials meet the institutions’ criteria, archivists ask, “Why should I save this?” and “Why should I save this?” While the first question addresses the material’s value as evidence, the second queries its appropriateness for the repository. 

Collections should have robust documentation and chain of custody. They should also display the depth of the subject matter, genres, and formats and be in reasonable condition and quantity. Archivists consider the worthiness of materials without provenance or description; those needing significant conservation, research, or arrangement; those duplicated elsewhere; those with access or usage restrictions; or those too costly to acquire or manage. Selection results in a high-quality, cohesive collection that fulfills the institution’s needs. 

Primary and Secondary Values 

Appraisal distinguishes between primary and secondary values. Primary values are those immediate to the record’s creation: the original administrative, legal, or fiscal purpose. After the first purpose is complete, records can also acquire secondary values for historical research: evidential and informational. Evidential values reflect the records’ importance as evidence of the organization’s functions, policies, and operations for accountability rather than legal purposes. Informational value relates to other uses of records for documentation of society or historical information, providing unique and permanent information for research purposes. 

Traditionally, records are valued for their informational content. The prevalent notion that materials can only be appraised for their informational values may have developed because acquisition and processing have obscured their evidential values. Only the informational value remains intact when records lack provenance and original order. 

The context of the record’s creation, original and subsequent use, preservation history, authorship, purpose, message, and audience inform evidential values. Digitization may obliterate evidential value because digital surrogates risk losing evidential value due to obscured context and circumstances. Viewing records with the archival principles of provenance and original order intact makes determining evidential values possible.

Intrinsic and Artifactual Values

Archivists appraise intrinsic and artifactual values. A record’s physical or relational qualities (based on its affiliation to an individual, family, organization, place, or event) create intrinsic value. It is inherent in its original form and independent of its informational or evidential value. Artifactual value is the significance of an item based on its physical characteristics rather than its intellectual content. For example, materials, including photographs, should be aesthetically appealing to fulfill their research potential and be reproducible for articles, publications, and exhibits.

Records with intrinsic value have qualities that make their original form the only archivally acceptable form for preservation. These characteristics may include aesthetic quality, content, usage, market value, uniqueness, age, or scarcity. Intrinsic and artifactual values determine whether materials should receive conservation treatment in their original format or be reformatted as a copy and whether security or access protections are necessary. 

Technology as a Tool

Digitization enables broader access to cultural heritage collections, and that increased access serves many functions from education to entertainment. Evidence demonstrates that audiences can leverage the power of online access and use collections innovatively. Furthermore, given the current state of analog media deterioration, creating surrogate copies of a collection is a far better alternative than losing documentary evidence. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Creating Sustainable Digital Files

Interpolation is the process of creating missing data, often used to create new pixels to insert into an image or to choose which pixels to remove from a resized image to keep the resolution and ensure that the image does not pixelate. 

Interpolation is also referred to as resampling, upsampling (increasing the number of pixels), or downsampling (decreasing the number of pixels). 

Compression

Compression algorithms reduce the number of bytes needed to represent data and the amount of memory required to store images. As a result, this process increases the amount of data sent online and permits more image storage. Compression relies on two main strategies: redundancy reduction and irrelevancy reduction. 

Redundancy reduction searches for patterns to express more efficiently. An image viewed after lossless compression will be identical to how it was before. The compressed file may still be too large for network dissemination. However, lossless compression supplies efficient storage when all the information stored in an image must be preserved for future use.

Irrelevancy reduction, a lossy compression, uses a means for discarding the least significant information to create smaller file sizes. Lossy compression reduces the image’s quality for more storage. Still, it should not be used when image quality is essential, such as with archival digital files.

Not all images respond to lossy compression similarly. A compressed image may produce artifacts or unintended visual effects. Other images, such as those with text or line illustrations, will show the lossy compression artifacts more clearly. Artifacts may accumulate over generations, especially with different compression schemes. Archivists should keep uncompressed master files from which they generate derivative files. 

Recommended Formats

File formats ensure that the data is stored so that other systems can access files. Archivists consider long-term usefulness and accessibility and choose non-propriety standards. Formats provide the maximum re-use of the images across projects and through time.

Despite the range of file formats, a few are recommended for image collections. The most common formats for digital imaging projects are TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group File Interchange Format).

The “tagged” in TIFF refers to the format’s structure, which allows for custom metadata fields without affecting compatibility. As a result, TIFF is the best file format for preserving high-quality images.

JPEG is a lossy compression format that compresses data by assigning a color value to a block of pixels rather than to individual pixels. The process can be controlled but causes deterioration, most noticeably in smooth gradient areas. Therefore, JPEG is best used with continuous-tone images online or when storage space is limited.

Some cameras capture RAW formats, including the original data captured by the sensor. The technician can adjust the white balance, exposure, and sharpness before saving the images in a non-proprietary format. RAW processing offers maximum flexibility with image brightness and white balance. It removes the limitations of fixed in-camera processing, such as sharpening. RAW files usually have higher bit depths than JPEGs and TIFFs. The RAW format is often considered a digital negative because the image has little camera processing. Since no standards exist, an image editor capable of translating them should open RAW files. 

Making Decisions

Converting physical information to electronic form encompasses a range of knowledge to inform procedures with varying implications. Consequently, the judgments archivists make during digitization projects involve not only an understanding of the fundamentals of the process but also the intellectual and physical nature of the materials, the current and potential users and uses, and how the resulting records will be described, delivered, and archived. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact