Education
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
Digital Directions: Fundamentals of Creating and Managing Digital Collections
Faculty Abstracts
Keynote Address
Working Together to Build the Digital Future:
From RTFMs to Ubuntu, lessons learned to live by!
Simon Tanner, King’s College London
Planning a Digital Project
Kristine R. Brancolini, Loyola Marymount University
A successful digitization project requires careful yet flexible planning. This presentation will outline and elaborate upon the steps in the planning process, including determining the need for the project, articulating goals and objectives, identifying audiences, developing a work plan, determining an evaluation approach, creating a schedule, identifying and assigning appropriate personnel and material resources, developing a budget, and identifying appropriate sources of funding. The presentation will include suggestions for building in flexibility with regard to achieving project goals and objectives.
Selection in the Digital Age
Janet Gertz, Columbia University
This session discusses selection of materials for digital conversion within a preservation context. Careful selection is important as the first step in planning a digitization project or program, and to avoid wasting time and effort digitizing the wrong materials or digitizing for the wrong reasons. A variety of rationales for digitization are discussed.
Selection criteria guide evaluation whether materials should be digitized, whether they may be digitized, and whether they can be digitized. Criteria include whether the item or collection has sufficient value to justify digitization, whether digitization is appropriate for materials of this type, whether digitization can achieve the desired goals, whether the institution has infrastructure to carry out a digitization project and preserve the digital product, whether it has the intellectual property rights to create and disseminate digital versions, and whether the cost is appropriate.
Each institution must develop strategic plans and priorities for digital conversion grounded in its mission and goals. Examples drawn from several different types of institutions are discussed.
Matching the Digital Capture Device to the Material
David Joyall, Northeast Document Conservation Center
The ubiquitous flat bed scanner has occupied the corner of our desks for years now. The range of materials being digitized today requires equipment setups that can handle everything from lantern slides to wall maps and everything in between. My discussion will compare key components of scanners and digital camera work stations. Does it make sense to purchase all-in-one machines or equipment dedicated to particular formats? I will also talk about storing the incredibly large files that are created. What do you need to handle these files beyond the minimum system requirements? Safe handling of visual materials is also a key concern during the digitization process. For some objects, the scanning process may represent the most stress they have ever received. Appropriate equipment choices and proper handling practices will help keep brittle and delicate objects safe.
That All-Important Metadata
Liz Bishoff, University of Colorado, Boulder
Many individuals believe that metadata is no longer necessary: massive computing capabilities negate the need for human created metadata, Google and other search engines will find everything. Managing digital resources requires the creation of descriptive, technical, administrative, and preservation metadata in order to ensure long-term access to digital content. Some of this metadata is created as part of the digitization process while some of it must still be created by humans. This presentation will begin by reviewing the key issues associated with access to digital resources and types of metadata. Standards and best practices will be highlighted and tools for creating metadata will also be discussed.
Outsourcing and Vendor Relations
Robin Dale, University of California, Santa Cruz
Early in project planning, critical decisions must be made that will affect the outcomes and success of digitization projects. Earlier sessions in the conference will provide guidance related to project planning, selection, and digitization quality and device issues. Another key consideration that must be addressed is whether to tackle the entire project in-house or whether to outsource some functions to service providers.
Certainly the early inclination is to tackle the project in-house, mainly because people assume that the "learn-by-doing" method is ty the early inclination is to tackle the project he best way to tackle digitization projects, especially a first project. That assumption however, is not always correct. In many instances, there are very valid reasons why outsourcing at least some services makes more sense. This session will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing, consider what questions need be asked to determine whether outsourcing will help you best achieve your project goals, and provide guidance on establishing and maintaining positive vendor relations.
Text Alive! – The Body, Mind, and Soul of the Digitized Written Word
Tom Blake, Boston Public Library
Language is a living thing. The static handwritten and typeset characters that have recorded it can come to life in amazing ways in a digital, networked environment. Current and imminent technology offers us unprecedented opportunities to deliver, download, store, share, index, cross-reference, analyze, and annotate the written word. To take advantage of these opportunities, digital text objects must be created and nurtured appropriately. Page images, machine-readable characters, and robust, well-formed metadata are respectively, the body, mind, and soul of well-rounded and well-behaved digitized text. The formative technical processes and associated costs involved in each of these aspects will be discussed by pulling the curtain back on some selected examples of digital text projects – revealing how they were created, why (or if) they work, and what their goals and motives seem to be. Participants will have a better sense of the options available and steps involved for creating digital text and thus, a better-informed process for determining goals, hopes, and dreams for their own projects.
Audio & Video Digitization: Fundamentals, First Steps, and Finance
Sam Brylawski, University of California, Santa Barbara
Preservation of sound recordings and video into digital formats has only recently been accepted into the family of best practices. While the analog era is behind us, standards and best practices for digital audiovisual preservation are still in the process of being developed and documented. This presentation will review available resources and options for digitization of audio and video, and issues and criteria to be considered when planning and budgeting a project. These include selection and prioritizing of audio-visual collections for digitization, the physical characteristics and content of source materials, emerging file format and metadata standards, and the challenges of long-term storage. The presentation will also review resources required for in-house digitization of audio-visual materials and criteria to be employed when choosing a contractor to carry out a project.
Transforming Reels: How to get the best out of film digitizing projects
Karen Colbron, WGBH Educational Foundation
As we face the ongoing push by our users to digitize our collections, it is easy to target the more accessible, and generally cheaper, formats such as documents and stills. Film materials are often pushed to the bottom of the priority pile because of unfamiliarity with the format, potentials costs involved, and lack of technical knowledge as to the best way to organize and digitize these materials.
WGBH Educational Foundation has undertaken several diverse film digitizing projects within the last few years using local and remote facilities and vendors. Most recently they embarked on a 2-year project to reconstitute the majority of the film materials generated by the series Vietnam: A Television History.
By presenting several case studies from large-scale film reconstitution to smaller-scale digitization projects, we can begin to address the questions that we need to ask as we contemplate our film digitization projects. What is the real purpose of digitizing our films? Who are the audience, and what do they expect to see? What are the potential pitfalls, and what questions should we be asking vendors? The lessons learned and advice given will prepare you with a toolkit to digitize your film materials – no matter how big or small your budget or collection.
Scanning 101
Scott Kehoe, Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System
Scanning 101 will be an introduction to scanning terminology and concepts. Tips and tricks, “rules of thumb,” and basic technical standards will all be shared. Terms such as pixel, resolution, interpolation, DPI, JPEG, and TIFF will be reviewed and illustrated. Technical considerations such as image enhancement, file size, and file type will also be discussed. The equipment focus will be on flatbed scanners, their use as well as purchasing considerations. And a word about workflow: think before you scan! We may even make a quick foray into imaging software, highlighting freeware options. Questions and your experiences will be encouraged.
The Essentials of Delivery Systems
Greg Colati, University of Denver
While there is no single solution for delivering digital content online, there are a number of opportunities, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The delivery options you will have are also based on a number of decisions that were made at the point of content and metadata creation. Finally, consider primary audience needs when designing a delivery system. The challenge is to combine characteristics of digital content with the strengths of delivery options to meet the needs of your primary audiences.
This session will examine the interrelationship between content creation, management, and delivery and discuss some strategies to consider when developing a digital content delivery system. We will also look at some examples of how this question has been answered at a variety of institutions from libraries to archives and cultural heritage institutions.
Copyright and Rights Management
Peter Hirtle, Cornell University
When selecting material for digitization, copyright law can be an area of great uncertainty and risk. Even in the best of circumstances, the copyright status of some material, or the legality of a repository making the material available on the Web, will be uncertain. The safest course would be to severely limit the type of material made available via the Web, even though this approach might be in opposition to a broader institutional mission.
This session will explore the strategies a digitization program can follow to minimize the risks inherent when publishing material on the Web. It will present a workflow that you can use to help you assess copyright issues in selected works. It will also discuss what options you have to protect your own interests in digitized work. Throughout, the presentation will emphasize that digitization project managers need to work with their administrators to establish a mutually acceptable level of institutional risk.
Standards and Best Practices: The Foundation of Sustainability
Anne Sauer, Tufts University
This presentation will discuss the importance of standards, understanding how they develop and change, how to approach evaluation of standards for particular projects, and strategies for articulating their importance to others.
Digital Preservation & Digital Disaster Preparation
Bill Walker, Imaging Field Services Officer, Amigos Library Services
While computer hardware, software, and files are susceptible to traditional disasters, such as fire, water, and wind, they can also be damaged by more subtle means. Power surges, failures of legacy technologies, and a host of other dangers can precipitate loss of an organization’s mission-critical data. Digital preservation and digital disaster planning and response are closely related. Failure to perform the short-term work and long-term planning to preserve digital objects will result in losses when disaster strikes.
Does your institution have a digital disaster plan that prioritizes the electronic materials that need to be saved and lists contacts for staff and vendors responsible for beginning the recovery? Unfortunately, most institutions do not. What potential dangers threaten your hardware, storage, and irreplaceable digital assets? This presentation outlines the challenges to preserving digital objects and preparing for disasters that threaten digital resources, and lists short- and long-term solutions for ensuring access to these materials.
Show Us the Money! Funding Digitization Initiatives
Tom Clareson, PALINET
Funding the digitization initiative can be one of the major barriers in establishing a digital collection initiative. Libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations are already stretched to fund established programs and services. Finding the financial resources to hire new staff, retrain existing staff, establish digital imaging labs, implement new digital asset management systems, and expand Web sites seems a daunting task.
Successful digital initiatives look to a variety of funding sources to support their digital initiatives. This session will explore recent research on how organizations are funding digital initiatives, look at funding sources, discuss grant opportunities in digitization, and provide some guidance in successful grant writing for digitization.
Getting Into the Flow: Why Much of What We Thought About Digitization Is Wrong
Roy Tennant, OCLC Programs and Research
In the context of mass digitization by Google and the Open Content Alliance, where should libraries be placing their digitization efforts? How can we be most effective in this space? What has been wrong about our approach to digitization, and how should we change? These questions and more will be explored in a session that will send you home thinking.