Margot Note's Blog, page 37

Metadata for Archival Collections: Challenges and Opportunities

Metadata is one of the significant costs of digitization. Although archival items can be digitized without cataloging, a digital collection cannot be created and delivered without metadata.

Providing sufficient metadata promptly for the abundance of digital resources can create a bottleneck in a workflow. Creating and maintaining metadata about objects—and in particular digital information objects—is time consuming and costly. Metadata creators must provide enough information to be useful but cannot afford to be exhaustive.

The Four Metadata Types

There are four types of metadata: administrative, descriptive, preservation, and technical.

Administrative metadata captures the context necessary to understand information resources. It documents the life cycle of an electronic resource, including data about ordering, acquisition, maintenance, licensing, rights, ownership, and provenance. It is essential that the provenance of a digital image object is recorded from, where possible, the time of its creation through all successive changes in custody of ownership. Users and curators must be provided with a sound basis for confidence that a digital image is what it is purported to be. There should be an audit trail of all changes.

Descriptive metadata attempts to capture the intellectual attributes of the images, enabling users to locate and select suitable assets based on their subjects.

Preservation metadata is the information about an item used to protect it from deterioration or destruction.

Technical metadata assures that the information content of a digital file can be resurrected even if the viewing applications associated with the file have vanished.

Embedded or Linked

Metadata can be embedded in digital images or stored separately. Embedding metadata within the image it describes ensures the metadata will not be lost, obviates problems of linking between data and metadata, and helps ensure that the metadata and image will be updated together. Storing metadata separately can simplify the management of the metadata itself and facilitate search and retrieval. Metadata is usually stored in a database system and linked to the items described.

Useful, Not Exhaustive

The biggest challenge is balancing the ideal scenario of comprehensive description with the more practical scenario of “good enough” description. Factors influencing this equation are the limited resources available for digitization regarding staff, time, and funding.

In my experience, cataloging and indexing can account for nearly a third of the overall costs of projects. These costs present considerable challenges to the economics of traditional library cataloging, which creates metadata records characterized by precision, detail, and professional intervention. This high price is impractical in the context of the growth of networked resources—and less expensive alternatives are needed.

Metadata creation requires both organizational and subject expertise to describe images effectively. Organizational expertise refers to the ability to apply the correct structure, syntax, and use of metadata elements, while subject expertise refers to the ability to generate a meaningful description of the material for users. High-quality metadata utilizing both expertise types is an integral part of effective searching, retrieval, use, and preservation of digital resources.

Promoting Interoperability

Describing images with metadata allows them to be understood by both humans and machines in ways that promote interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of many systems with different hardware and software platforms, levels of granularity, controlled vocabularies, data types, and interfaces to exchange data with minimal loss of content and functionality. Archival assets across the network can be searched more seamlessly using defined metadata schemes and shared transfer protocols.

Metadata Crosswalks

Metadata crosswalks—mappings of the elements, semantics, and syntax from one metadata scheme to another—further facilitate the exchange of metadata. The degree to which the crosswalk is successful at the item level depends on the similarity of the schemes, the granularity of the elements in the target scheme compared to that of the source, and the compatibility of the content rules used to fill the elements of each scheme.

Crosswalks are essential for collections where resources are drawn from a number of sources and are expected to act as a whole, perhaps with a single search engine applied. While crosswalks are critical, they are also labor-intensive to develop and maintain. The mapping of schemes with fewer elements, or less granularity, to those with more details, or more granularity, is problematic. These problems have led to frustration for users who want consistent metadata interoperability across digital imaging products and services. Manufacturers of digital imaging hardware, software, and services spend substantial resources dealing with these problems. Until these complexities are resolved, the problems will continue to cost users and archivists time and resources.

Translating Metadata Across Collections

Due to these issues, archivists and other information professionals are working towards creating better models for crosswalks that unites the crosswalk, the source metadata standard, and the target metadata standard. With each effort, we improve machine-readable encoding and human-readable description, while bringing together all of the information required to access and interpret information. In time, we will become better at describing complex objects for our users.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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October 3rd is Ask An Archivist Day

To kick off American Archives Month, Wednesday, October 3rd is Ask an Archivist Day. This day-long event, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, will give you the opportunity to connect directly with archivists in your community—and around the country—to ask questions, get information, or just satisfy your curiosity.

As professional experts who do the exciting work of protecting and sharing important historical materials, archivists have many stories to share about the work they do every day in preserving fascinating documents, photographs, audio and visual materials, and artifacts. Increasingly, archival work extends beyond the physical and includes digital materials.

Use #AskAnArchivist on Twitter to ask your questions about what archivists do are anything else related to archives. Your question will be seen instantly by archivists around the country who are standing by to respond directly to you. 

Have a question for a specific archives or archivist? Include their Twitter handle with your question, and they will answer you. 

Don’t have a question right away? Search Twitter for #AskAnArchivist and follow along as questions and answers are shared. 

I'll be following along, and answering questions myself. My Twitter handle is @margotnote.

Values to Consider During Selection for Digitization

Selection practice in most archives is aimed at meeting the current needs of user communities. Criteria developed by archives to select items for digitization are based on evidential and aesthetic values, as well as informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values.

Aesthetic Values

Items chosen for digitization depend on aesthetic values, as well as traditional research values. Just as good grammar assists verbal communication and standardizes comprehension, aesthetic quality aids in our visual communication.

To fulfill their historical research potential and to be reproducible for articles, publications, and exhibits, historical items should have proper focus to render detail, exposure that preserves the full range of tonal contrast, clarity, fine composition, and be in good physical condition—in short, be aesthetically appealing. While these artistic characteristics contribute to composition, materials used in historical research were taken and preserved for more prosaic reasons than art.

Informational Values

Archival records are not primarily preserved for their aesthetic value or intellectual content but are expected to serve some useful purpose. Among those most valuable to scholars are items that document people, places, things, and events for the purposes of reporting news, encouraging reform, advertising a product or service, promoting a government program, explaining a scientific or industrial process, or illustrating an idea. What is more significant than an item’s aesthetics, especially during appraisal, are its evidential and informational values as confirmation of its creator’s activities and its subjects.

Primary and Secondary Values

Archival appraisal is distinguished between primary and secondary values. Primary values are those immediate to the creation of the record, its original administrative, legal, or fiscal purpose for its creators. After their first purpose, records can also acquire secondary values for historical research—their evidential and informational values, which are not mutually exclusive. Evidential values reflect the importance of records as evidence of the organization, its functions, its policies, and the operations of the records creator, for accountability and historical purposes rather than legal purposes. Informational value relates to any other uses of records for documentation of society or historical information, providing unique and permanent information for the purposes of research.

Evidential Values

Evidential values are derived from the context of creation, original and subsequent use, preservation history, authorship, purpose, message, and audience. In order to understand evidential values, archivists should recognize the original intention of the item—its particular cultural use by particular people. This is rarely given within the picture but is developed in its function or context. Photographs with intact original arrangement by the creator are useful as they allow repository staff to infer information from the context and to assume the authenticity and judge the reliability of the accession. The photographer’s notes and other sources should be sought out, preserved, and made available, to add context to the photographs.

Archival value in photographs resides in the interrelationship between photographs and the creating structures, animating functions, programs and information technology that created them. Photographs are complex, multilayered objects whose archival values derive from series of interrelationships between photographs and other archival formats. What is invisible are the ephemeral, provenance-based relationships from which archives in original order gain their authenticity.

Unfortunately, these interrelationships are often lost during preservation. Evidential value is frequently embedded in the physical structure of the album, its sequence of pages, the placement of images, and the juxtaposition of words and images. The larger documentary universe of which the material is a part is sacrificed in an effort to ensure the long-term physical stability of individual items. The meaning of the album, not simply as a housing for the images, but as a document in its own right, and the information it was compiled to communicate is lost.

Additionally, digitization may also obliterate evidential value. The risk posed by digital surrogates is the loss of evidential value due to the destruction of evidence as to the context and circumstances of their origin. Viewing photographs with their archival principles of provenance and original order intact makes determining evidential values possible.

Intrinsic and Artifactual Values

Beyond evidential and informational values, intrinsic and artifactual values should also be appraised. Intrinsic value is the significance of an item derived from its physical or associational qualities (based on its relationship to an individual, family, organization, place, or event), inherent in its original form and generally independent of its informational or evidential value. Artifactual value is the significance of an item based on its physical or aesthetic characteristics, rather than its intellectual content.

Records with intrinsic value have qualities that make their original physical form the only archivally acceptable form for preservation. These characteristics may include aesthetic quality, content, usage, market value, unique physical features, age, or scarcity. Images with strong artifactual values tend to be the most heavily used images in most repositories. High artifactual value is what users look for in photographs, particularly for images to reproduce, exhibit, or publish.

Intrinsic and artifactual values determine whether photographs should receive conservation treatment in their original format or should be reformatted as a copy, and whether special security or access protections are needed.

As you select items for digitization, consider the needs, expectations and interests of your user community, and take into account informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values as well as aesthetics.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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Digital Imaging and Resolution Recommendations

Digital imaging captures all the information in photographic originals. Read on for some guidelines on making the best digitization choices, always with the ultimate usage of the images in mind.

A high-quality standard produces versatile digital images but requires storage and manipulation of large files, while a lower quality standard generates more manageable files but often limits their utility for publication or exhibition. Selecting the appropriate quality level depends on the desired uses of the images in the long term. For instance, low-resolution images may be sufficient for classroom use by undergraduates but would be inappropriate for conservators assessing details.

Aim High

Although images are often viewed on monitors, projectors, or other low-resolution devices, images should be captured and digitized at the highest quality that is practical. You can transform a high-resolution image into a lower-resolution one by reducing the image size and discarding pixel information, but it is impossible to do the reverse without pixilation. I’ve found that educating users about the importance of high-resolution images is invaluable. High-resolution master images, as well as smaller access copies of the same images, provide both the large pictures needed for reproduction, as well as quicker access to the photos.

However, digitizing at the highest possible quality is not always feasible. Full information capture creates a digital replacement of the original regarding spatial and tonal information content, which is defined by film format, emulsion type, shooting conditions, and processing techniques. Ultimately, the information content has to be determined, whether based on human perception, the physical properties of the original, or a combination of both elements before digitization.

More Details, Bigger Files

Additionally, image quality may be compromised to enhance system performance. The full quality of the image stored is often not reflected in when it is displayed, as most display devices are capable of far less resolution than printers are. The higher the quality of the image, the more storage it will occupy and the more system resources it will require, including higher bandwidth networks, more memory in workstations, and longer and costlier scanning.

Digitizing everything within a collection at high resolution and full color is uneconomical. However, if the resolution is too low, the surrogates will be a poor likeness of the image they represent.

File Formats

Digital images are saved in a file format, the structure by which data is organized in a file. Despite the range of file formats, only a few are recommended for image collections. The most common formats include TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group File Interchange Format), PNG (Portable Network Graphics), and GIF (Graphic Interchange Format). Many digital image collections use TIFF master files and JPEG derivative files.

TIFFs and JPEGs

The “tagged” in TIFF refers to the internal structure of the format, which allows for arbitrary additions, such as custom metadata fields, without affecting general compatibility. These tags describe the size of the image or define how the image data is arranged and identify the compression algorithm that is used. TIFF supports several types of image data compression, allowing an organization to select the most appropriate for their needs, and many users of TIFF opt for a lossless compression scheme such as Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) encoding, to avoid degradation of image quality during compression. Users often avoid any compression at all, an option TIFF readily accommodates, to ensure that image data will be simple to decode. TIFF is the best file format for archiving high-quality images, because files may be edited and saved without damage.

JPEG is a lossy compression format that allows image data to be compressed by assigning a compromise color value to a block of pixels rather than to each separate pixel. The extent of this process can be controlled, but there is irretrievable deterioration in image quality, most noticeably in smooth gradient areas. JPEG is best used with continuous tone photographic images, destined for email and web use, or for storage when space is limited. It is not suitable for use with line drawings.

Benefits of Low-Resolution Images

Monitors display images between 72 and 100 dpi, depending on the type and quality of the display, with top models displaying 200 dpi, in which the pixels blend to the human eye, presenting a smooth image. If preparing images primarily to be displayed on the screen, such as a website, low resolution is suitable. Low-resolution images online also have the added benefit of preventing the usage of the images for commercial printing.

Low-resolution images also allow information to be shared quicker, whether emailed, posted online, or embedded in a document. Copies of the larger digital surrogates allow for ease of access.

Benefits of High-Resolution Images

Printed images require 300 dpi to replicate the sharpness of conventional photographs. Most inkjet printers are capable of producing 300 to 1200 dots per inch. When creating digital images for print, it is useful to know the printing technique and output resolution.

High-resolution images should always be 300 dpi; the size of the file depends on how large you will need the images. For example, I once directed a digital project that scanned slides from the 1960s to the early 2000s. The resulting images had to be massive—to allow users of an art history subscription database to examine the architectural details as if the users were physically there. I saved the images as master TIFFs, then duplicated them and reduced them into smaller JPEGs for access.

Plan Ahead

An increasing number of cultural heritage organizations are starting digital projects. Unfortunately, questions of image quality tied to resolution are often neglected at the beginning of such projects. The image quality choices made when the files are first created have a profound effect on cost, research value, and usefulness of the images as preservation surrogates. Image quality requirements, therefore, should be established before a digital project starts. Plan your digital project, with resolution recommendations in mind, to make sure your efforts will achieve their maximum effectiveness.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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Image Description Practices for Digital Archives Projects

Formal standards, such as Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), Graphic Materials, and Rules for Archival Description (RAD), have been developed over time for the description of archival materials. While descriptive standards offer consistency, archival repositories employ descriptive systems suited to their holdings, not universal access, and description continues to be idiosyncratic.

For example, the ISAD (G): General International Standard of Archival Description defines multilevel principles, such as moving from the broad to specific, linking hierarchical levels, and basic descriptive elements. These elements include creator names, titles, dates, administrative history, scope and content, and locations of originals and copies.

In the absence of universal standards and the subjective nature of description, institutions have many options for describing their holdings to make them accessible.

MARC Records

With the advent of computers, some institutions used MARC records to provide subject indexing for large collections through individual collection-level records. The MARC records point users to a finding aid for a particular collection to obtain more detailed information. Since the finding aids were generally paper-based, and often only available locally at the institution, users would have to view them in person.

Enter the EAD

Item-level MARC cataloging of images, while in some cases desirable, was often neither warranted nor economically feasible. The hierarchical format and electronic access capabilities of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid, however, offer the possibility of a more powerful, flexible alternative.

EAD was developed as a way of marking the data contained in finding aids so that they can be searched and displayed online. EAD promised a more sophisticated way not only to produce searchable text but to eventually provide descriptions in an environment that would facilitate sophisticated cross-collection searching.

EADs index image collections by providing access points at the collection or item level, depending on the needs of the institution, collection, and users. As the tools for accessing finding aids become more sophisticated, EADs’ content-specific indexing capabilities makes them a powerful resource for standardized, integrated access to primary source collections.

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set 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 continuing development of the Dublin Core and related specifications is managed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

Dublin Core is designed for ease of use and is less expensive to implement than more complex metadata schemes. The core set of 15 data elements describe and facilitate discovery of images—capturing information regarding the title, identifier, creator, contributor, publisher, language, description, subject, coverage, date, type, relation, format, source, and rights of a digital image. None of the elements are mandatory and all can be repeated and expanded if needed.

While Dublin Core metadata serves as a functional framework for exposing metadata, the standard is open to interpretation. Use of the elements may vary among institutions. Its simple nature is not suited to capturing descriptions with a high-level of granularity, but it focuses on interoperability and international consensus.

A Most Versatile Format

Dublin Core is especially attractive to cultural heritage institutions, because of the number of commercial systems that have adopted and supported it. Dublin Core is also Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) compliant, which allows for repository interoperability by enabling institutions to export their records in Dublin Core for inclusion in search services based on metadata systems of varying types. The development of Dublin Core benefited from feedback drawn from an international community of archives, libraries, museums, government agencies, and corporations.

In my consulting practice, I have found Dublin Core to be the most flexible, accessible, and adaptable format for image description. It is usable by both non-experts, as well as description specialists. It is also extensible for richer descriptions. Dublin Core allows just enough elucidation to be helpful to users, without being too laborious for image catalogers.

Keywords

Current practices for structuring image collections include lists, indexes, directories, catalogs, thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies, typologies, metadata, templates, or topic maps. Retrieval systems and digital asset management (DAM) software are based on language, particularly keywords, because words are extractable from documents.

For images, there is no language to extract, only language to apply. Keywords provide content-based access points to images because they label the objects being photographed. To a lesser extent, they can also be concept-based, detailing an image’s features, attributes, and characteristics.

Rather than designing more effective language-based algorithms, retrieval system designers should reinterpret keyword searches based on information-seeking behavior, cognition, and memory. Newer approaches like tagging and algorithmic or heuristic browsing provide more search versatility. Browsing based on both content and concept and on images alone remains on the edge of discovery.

Semantic Keywords

Online collections offer structuring ingenuity because digital images can belong to multiple categories simultaneously, whereas physical images cannot. Collections have evolved from mutually exclusive categories, often arranged in hierarchies, to digital images with any number of labels, allowing users to focus on inter-relationships and cognition. With online collections, folksonomy, or social tagging, allows viewers to apply semantic keywords to images, which could cultivate deeper associations between the multiple meanings of the images.

Contextual Information

Thorough, informative description is a key to improving the representation of historical images. The better the cataloging, the richer the contextualizing information that surrounds the photographs—and the better able users are to appreciate them in their historical context. Digital images require sufficient descriptive data to render them available, understandable, and usable for as long as they have continuing value. The types of information needed to describe digital images will differ from, and may exceed, that needed to describe analog images, but the basic purpose of description remains the same.

Pre-Project Indexing

For digital projects, it is usually assumed that indexing is already completed to an adequate level before digitization, but this has rarely been the case in my experience. Description is often just being applied or considerably improved upon as part of the project. Much of the data required for image records appears as annotations on the original images. Therefore, no matter what the form of the access records, information usually is assembled from various sources. Since description is not the main outcome of a digital project, it is often done in a perfunctory way. Inadequate description does a disservice to the amount of labor and resources that a digital project requires. The complexity of description, along with the work that goes into its production, is often under appreciated. Access records for digital surrogates involve far more than simple digital conversion.

Seeing as Indexing

Digital collections with thumbnail presentation of images and metadata provide access to hidden collections. Systems like this depend on the most sophisticated classification system by far—the human eye. The electronic era holds out the promise of richer descriptive systems that are incorporated into the design of automated applications and implemented as records are created. Until then, our eyes, and how visual-literate we are, will assist us in accessing images for researching, learning, and teaching.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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Selection for Digitization – Best Practices

The development of selection policies is a core component of digital projects, and many selection guidelines and criteria have been developed by institutions, national governments, and international organizations. Institutions need to validate their selection procedures for digitization concerning external criteria, especially with the increase of collaborations for digital projects.

Funding is most likely to be available where proposed digitization programs meet agreed criteria regarding preparation, selection, and image capture. Since only a small percentage of an image collection can be digitized, archivists must determine what is most worthwhile to convert. Selection should be influenced by aesthetic, evidential, informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values, as well as indicators unique to the digital realm.

Know Your Rights

The most important selection criteria for digitization is the copyright status of the original materials. Images should have their copyright held by the organization or be in the public domain. If not, permission to digitize must be obtained by the rights holder. If the institution does not have the right to digitize, then other images must be chosen, or the project cannot proceed.

Issues regarding intellectual property, cultural sensitivities, privacy and publicity rights, obscenity, and pornography can lead to lawsuits and costly settlements. Additionally, donor restrictions must be investigated to determine if the images can be digitally captured and presented online. Digitization performed without careful selection may result in the creation of digital files that cannot be used due to legal restrictions. Determining the legal status of candidate materials is a crucial step in any digital selection process. If institutions have images encumbered by a difficult permissions process, it may be more expeditious to consider other collections.

Usage as a Selection Factor

Usage is another factor which determines a collection’s priority for digitization. Selected images should support current prioritized activities, public programs, and outreach activities, such as exhibitions, publications, and cultural events; enhance the strengths of the institution; and have the potential for the enduring value of digital objects. Items with pedagogical utility for classroom use, curriculum support, or distance education are also ideal for digitization.

If analog images are well used, researchers will most likely also be interested in their digitized versions. Conversely, underused images may be good candidates for digitization, if they have widespread interest and a realistic expectation exists for attracting new users. However, images selected for conversion and hosted online, even if highly used in their analog form, are only a subset of the collection. Online aggregations of images give the public access to an edited view of history, rather than the more balanced perspective they would have if they were aware of the context from which the photographs originated.

Although making selection decisions based on use is tenable, doing so limits search results to the repeated use of the same images, perhaps without proper context. Archivists must determine the sapient balance between digitizing popular images and providing a richer representation of the institution’s holdings.

Intellectual Control

Potential projects should be evaluated as to whether the appropriate intellectual control can be provided for the original images and their digital surrogates. Archivists should assess the degree to which the images are arranged in a way suited to online use; if cataloging, processing, and related organizational work are already accomplished; and if there are appropriate staff and resources to support the creation of metadata relating to image identification.

Technical Considerations

Selected images should also be considered for their technical feasibility. Factors to consider are The degree to which a digital version can represent the full content of the original, whether the images will display well digitally, and the capacity for accessing images from current institutionally supported platforms/networked environments and delivering them with reasonable speed are factors to consider. The images should be at least as easy to use digitally as in their original form and should allow for improved access and new types of utilization when digitized.

Improved Access

Images that have restricted access due to their condition, value, vulnerability, or location should be considered for digitization so that access to originals can be reduced for preservation and safety purposes. Additionally, some images or collections may be chosen to enhance image quality. Digital conversion provides high-quality surrogates which, in most cases, will protect the images from handling and satisfy users of today and tomorrow.

Collaboration

Collections of images may be selected because of requests from potential partners in collaborative or consortial efforts. Digital conversion encourages new usage between organizations, and collections split among some institutions may be united online. Research may be enhanced by integrating images that otherwise would have remained separated in different parts of the world. The flexible integration and synthesis of a variety of formats, related materials scattered among many locations, and the contribution to the development of a critical mass of digital images in subject areas should also be considered.

Collective Mass

To make a digitization project worthwhile requires a certain minimum volume of information. Otherwise, the research value will be too low to attract enough planned or potential users. An important consideration is if whether an entire collection or a part of it will be digitized. The value of photographs is higher as in the aggregate, rather than as single items taken out of context.

Organizational Strategy

Other criteria include an examination of the strategic motives for initiating digitization projects, the institutional framework that will support them, and funding opportunities. Whatever the factors behind the decision to convert images to digital form, the selection process is further refined along a continuum that will require reassessment in successive stages.

A healthy balance of all these factors will allow the selection of archival materials for digitization to be the most beneficial to your institution, as well as to researchers around the world. In selecting well, archivists can focus on the parts of their collections that are well suited to digitization, make the best use of technology, and meet their users’ needs. Suitable selection builds digital collections that are both useful and usable, creating assets that can be managed well over time.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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How to Determine the Feasibility of Digital Archives Projects

Over the years, I have directed or have been a subject matter expert on a number of projects using born-digital and digitized cultural heritage materials. With each new experience, I have gathered a series of questions, an aide-mémoire, to be explored before commencing a digital initiative.

Asking these questions during the project planning phase will save an incredible amount of time, money, and resources later on. The project team, its sponsor, and stakeholders should be in agreement about these elements before the project begins. You will be amazed at how simply considering these questions as you formulate your project will provide you with the foresight to accept new opportunities and minimize the challenges that come with visionary archival projects.

Macro Level PlanningWhat are the short-term benefits of the project?What are the project’s strategic benefits in the long-term?What are desired outcomes of the project?What is the project workflow?What are the critical milestones or deadlines?Staffing ConsiderationsDoes the institution have the expertise and resources to plan and implement the project?What skills, experience, or training will be required?Who will oversee the project?What institutional support and leadership can be expected?How will this project affect staff roles and service at the institution?Is there appropriate staff to support the growing size and scope of the collections and access to these items by users?Who will be responsible for each stage of the project?Audience NeedsWho is the intended audience for this project?Are they specialists, generalists, or both?What are the needs of the users, and how can they be best served?What will this project enable them to do that is not possible now?Technology ConsiderationsIs there sufficient technical infrastructure to create and manage digital projects?What hardware and software is required for this project?Are there sufficient storage facilities to meet the needs of the project?Funding SpecificsWho will be responsible for fundraising and grant writing?What are the funding sources?Who will manage budgets?What parts of the project will funding support?Are the costs of the project in line with its anticipated value?What will it cost to maintain access to the project into the future?Item SelectionDo the items reflect the institutional mission and collections policies?What is the intellectual value of such a collection and their informational content?What are the items that are most valuable for teaching and scholarship?What items or collections are used most frequently, and how are they used?What items or collections are unique to the institution?Do the items have sufficient intrinsic value to ensure interest in their digital surrogates?Will digitization significantly enhance access or increase use of the items?How much of the collection is well documented?What items are of highest monetary value?What items are judged to be at highest risk and why?Are there any restricted or sensitive items or collections to be excluded?If you are digitizing images, are they well captioned?Will the proposed scanning technique be able to capture the appearance of the item accurately?Will disparate collections be unified?Are the items duplicated well elsewhere?Do the materials selected represent the collection’s strengths?Is there a danger of over- or under-representing specific themes?Physical CharacteristicsHow many items have to be digitized?What are the formats of the collection?What is the physical condition of the items?How do the originals need to be handled during scanning to prevent damage?Will the items be able to withstand handling during the scanning process?What size are the items?Are they oversized?Intellectual Property RightsWho will be responsible for determining the copyright status the items?Who owns the rights to the items?Are they in the public domain?If not, can permissions be secured?Are there legal or cultural considerations to be addressed?Are the items free from donor restrictions that would prevent them from being digitized or publicly accessed?PreparationWill the items be conserved before being scanned?Will it be necessary to clean the items before scanning?Will items need to be encapsulated or de-encapsulated before scanning?Will items need to be transported before digitization?Digitization StrategyWill the digitizing take place in-house or through a vendor?What are the resolutions and bit depths needed?Will the files be compressed?Should the items be faithful reproductions or optimized for presentation?How will copies of the items be stored?Are there specific image guidelines specified by the funding source?How will master and derivative files be created?Description RequirementsWhat type of description already exists for the collection?At what level will the metadata be: item, collection, or both?Is there sufficient metadata available to match user needs and project aims?What metadata scheme will be used?If there are several versions of an original, which version will be cataloged?Is it possible to create metadata that satisfies both general and specialized users?What level of granularity will most likely benefit users?Are there other fields necessary as access points that might be of interest to users?Will extensive research time be required to record even the minimal metadata requirements?Is there enough information readily available about the items to provide a useful context to potential audiences?Quality AssessmentIs digitization complete?Are items missing?Have the file naming conventions been adhered to?Are the files named for the correct original items?Have the items been captured in the correct mode (color or grayscale)?Are the items in the correct format and, if appropriate, are compression rates correct?Are the resolutions and bit depths correct?Are the tonal values and color balances correct?Are the brightness and contrast settings correct?Is there noticeable interference, noise, or artifacts?Does the item accurately represent the qualities of the original?Have the significant details been successfully reproduced?Have the items been checked on a variety of monitors?If printing is required, have the items been output to a variety of printers?Evaluation and MeasurementHow will evaluation of the digital resources be undertaken?What measures exist to demonstrate the project has succeeded?How will user perceptions and expectations of the project be addressed?Access and DiscoveryWill the items be linked to existing systems, or will it be necessary to develop a new access method for the items?At what level will access be provided: item, collection, or both?Will the items be accessible and deliverable online?How will users locate the collections, items within the collections, and relevant subsets of the items?How will items be viewed?One at a time or several together to facilitate comparisons?Will zooming in to see details be required?Will access be appropriately controlled?Outreach and CollaborationWill the project have a collaborative component?Is the collaboration local, national, or international?Is there a community outreach component?What will the instruction and end-user support be?SustainabilityHow and where will the archival items be stored?What kind of backup mechanisms are in place in case of hardware or software failure?What are the data migration and refreshment plans?Is there demonstrable long-term support in place to maintain the project and ensure its longevity in the future?

Each question you consider should give you pause. Some can be answered instantly; others need further discussion. These considerations can be used to determine if your digital project is worth pursuing.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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In-house and Outsourced Archives Digitization

Digitization can be performed either in-house or outsourced. In-house implies that a department of the institution captures the images—supplying hardware and software, trained personnel, and overhead. Outsourcing requires entering into a contract with a vendor who will receive the images, convert them, and return the originals with the required digital files. Both in-house and outsourced alternatives should be considered when embarking on a digitization project.

Whether to digitize in-house or via outsourcing depends on the scope, nature, fragility, and uniqueness of the materials, the project budget, and institutional resources.

When Using a Vendor Is Best

Given the high cost of scanning and related equipment, outsourcing is advantageous, because vendors bring their experience of working on many similar projects. Few institutions have sufficient budgets to keep pace with the latest hardware and software. Vendors maintain the newest equipment, employ specialists, and are knowledgeable about their services and costs. They can offer lower rates per image because they have streamlined workflows that have been perfected over time.

In my consulting practice, I often advise organizations—especially if they are new to digitization—to use a vendor. Outsourcing allows the organizational staff to gain knowledge about digitization at their own pace, instead of making costly mistakes by doing it on their own.

D.I.Y. Digitization

However, outsourcing imaging rather than developing in-house digitization services is not always the best solution. Archivists may be motivated to invest in the space, staff, training, and equipment needed for digitization if they already administer or have access to a scanning studio within the broader organization. Additionally, the institution may decide to invest in developing expertise that can be leveraged for other services. While using vendors is convenient, the experience gained during the execution of the outsourced work will be lost to the cultural institution at the end of the project. Performing digitization in-house retains this specialized knowledge. In-house imaging also allows for small-scale experimentation without having to write technical specifications and contracts. A pilot project may serve as a prelude to vending out the bulk of the work and is often a necessary step in the learning process.

When In-House Digitization Is Best

Working in-house is suitable when a project is small or can be broken down into segments, if the institution has skilled staff or staff with an incentive to learn, support from the administration for in-depth training, and already has appropriate equipment or funding to acquire it. By developing digital imaging expertise internally, even if the approach results in higher per-item costs for digital surrogates, the organization positions itself to digitize collections into the future.

Setting Up Your Workstation

To work in-house, an appropriate environment and hardware and software system must be in place before digitization can begin. Elements include scanners, digital cameras, copy stands, and other hardware; a computing infrastructure; and software for image capture, processing, metadata, and quality control. The working environment should be appropriate to the material being digitized, paying attention to light, humidity, vibration, and the movement of the originals.

Scanning Onsite

Candidate images will have to be moved to the location of the digitization equipment, either to another building or city. Although outsourcing usually entails sending images to vendors outside the institution, some vendors may be able to scan on site. The vendor working in your archives offers some of the benefits of in-house projects, such as closer oversight of the vendor, but providing an appropriate work area, as well as security, insurance, and other details will still be required.

A Hybrid Approach

I’ve chosen both in-house and outsourced digitization, depending on the size of the project, the turnaround time, and the quality needed for the resulting images. For the scanning of single items or small collections, I’ve digitized archival items with a scanner, then used Adobe Photoshop for post-production. For a massive project scanning thousands of slides, I used a vendor that offered drum-scanning so that I would receive high-quality, high-resolution images I would not be able to replicate with my own equipment. Allowing yourself to be flexible with your options guarantees results that will work for your institution.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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Best Practices for Planning a Digitization Project

As archivists, we take our responsibilities seriously as stewards of the collections entrusted to our care, ensuring that our assets remain safe and accessible to users. The demand for increased online access to collections, coupled with limited fiscal and staff resources, makes balancing the two a challenge.

I always advise my clients to evaluate staffing and budgetary resources before a digitization project starts. The aims of the project should be realistic when compared with the resources available. Creating objectives at the conception of a digitization project assures that the initiative is successful and sustainable.

Planning is Key

While planning a project, archivists must understand their institution’s mission and goals, know where the digital project fits into these goals and assess existing resources against those that need to be acquired. They should also factor in costs and capabilities for long-term maintenance of the digitized images. They need to establish standards that will be adhered to while conducting the digitization project, begin the documentation process to assure that decisions are well communicated, and provide direction. The project team should write a preliminary project plan, budget, timeline, and other planning documents. My experience in planning of archival projects has taught me to take as much time as needed at the outset of a project to define its goals and outcomes. The effort you expend at the conception of the project will save you blood, sweat, and tears throughout the project.

Defining the Scope

The scope of the project is often determined by the archival materials themselves. Evaluating the characteristics of the images to be digitized is part of the planning process, which involves determining the number of images to be digitized, identifying source formats, considering the images’ sizes, assessing unusual characteristics, and reviewing the condition of originals. The project should progress efficiently, and the workflow should be well organized. Equipment should be chosen to optimize quality and the level of production, suitable hardware and software must be selected, and image capture and editing rules must be set to maximize efficiency.

Leveraging Technology

The success of digital projects centers not on technology, but on project planning. In my experience, institutions may sometimes concentrate on technology before deciding on a project’s purpose. However, technology should never drive digital projects; instead, user-based desideratum should be determined first, and only then should the appropriate technology be selected to meet a project’s objectives. One thing that is unchangeable no matter what the technology is: insisting on the highest quality technical work that the institution can afford.

Creating New Research Opportunities for Users

Archivists should undertake projects that deliver resources to be utilized by a variety of user groups for research, learning, and general informational purposes. To this end, archivists should establish criteria outlining collection selection, metadata creation, and systems for access that address the varied interests of users. Digital collections should also enhance understanding of the value of the images, their authenticity, context, and historical significance. Institutions should provide a stable, scalable, and sustainable platform for the delivery and management of digital content, as well as strive to deliver content in ever-evolving ways, challenging archivists to create a premier research experience for their users.

Should We Continue?

Digital projects should also be reviewed for continued applicability. The value of existing projects may be reconsidered from time to time. In some cases, additional resources may be expended when enhanced accessibility will benefit users. Conversely, some digital projects may outlive their value and should be discontinued. Making decisions to end projects is often hard, but necessary.

The success of a project is in proportion to the time spent planning it. Digitization projects are laborious, complex, and costly. Plan ahead to make sure your project is a success.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.

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Crass Career Advice

The best career guidance I’ve encountered derives from an unlikely source, a record I purchased at Extreme Noise in Minneapolis when I was 16:

You must learn to live with your own conscience, your own morality, your own decision, your own self. You alone can do it. There is no authority but yourself.

The conclusion to the fifth studio album by seminal British anarchist punk band Crass urges listeners to take up the challenge of personal responsibility. The exhaustion of vocalist Eve Libertine’s delivery emphasizes the message’s sincerity. I’ve often thought about this mantra as it pertains to the LIS field.

Information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums work in environments that expect them to do more with less. As we perform our regular duties, we participate in committee work, publish and present our research, network, and pursue professional development opportunities. If we are lucky, these activities are supported and rewarded by our institutions. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Yet, the authority over our careers rests with us alone.

I recalled the agency of the individual recently while reading G. Kim Dority’s Rethinking Information Work: A Career Guide for Librarians and Other Information Professionals, an outstanding and highly recommended LIS career book. She writes:

The reality is that we can’t rely on an employer to pledge undying fealty—that is, lifetime employment—to us, because just like us, they have no idea what the future will hold. They may need to close our department, lay off staff because of mergers, cut our hours because of funding shortfalls, or transition us into positions that suit the organization’s needs rather than ours. None of this personal—it’s simply how organizations, including libraries, work.

Things change, life changes, we change. And approached with the right attitude, that can be terrific. The trick is to find a way to create a career that can match us change for change, can keep up with our growth, can continue to offer us new opportunities and new challenges. The key is to understand that, in the long run, we are all self-employed.

And believe it or not, this is good news. Because if we understand that regardless of our current employment situation we are solely responsible for the well-being of our careers and paychecks, that means that we can take control. We can focus not on lifetime employment but on lifetime employability (4-5).

Maximizing opportunities by developing and nurturing your career empowers you no matter what your current work situation is.

So whether you hear it from anarcho-punks or seasoned information specialists, remember and embrace: There is no authority but yourself.