Getting Started with Digital Collections

Scaling to Fit Your Organization

Jane D. Monson

• Publisher: ALA Editions
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780838915431
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838915462
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scienze dell'informazione e biblioteconomia

PART I

MANAGING PROJECTS

1

DIGITIZATION AT SMALLER INSTITUTIONS

Digitization has been one of the most frequently used buzzwords in the cultural heritage sector since the early twenty-first century, when the activity really began to take off in libraries, archives, and museums. While well-funded, cutting-edge institutions started their nascent digitization programs in the 1990s, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that a tipping point was reached—this is according to a 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries survey of academic libraries, which found a nearly tenfold increase in the number of digital collections reported since the previous year (Raab 2007). These days everyone’s doing it, or so it seems, and for many institutions—the large public and research libraries, museums, and archives of the world—it almost seems as good as done. If you look at the websites of institutions like the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or a Big Ten university library, you may find thousands if not millions of digitized objects in nicely designed collections, complete with detailed descriptive records and likely a slew of “added value” features such as OCR (optical character recognition) for full-text searching; images that can be zoomed, panned, and cropped; social media integration; or interactive multimedia such as maps and time lines. These collections represent many years and man-hours of work, usually involving specialists who are dedicated to their creation, and often entire departments of such specialists.

Often in the parlance of digital librarians and other technologists there is talk of “scaling,” referring to whether or not a process scales up to a larger level of magnitude. But in the case of digitization at smaller institutions, such as public and college libraries and local archives, museums, and historical societies, the better question may be whether the approach of larger institutions scales down. These are the places where digitization efforts may still be getting off the ground, and where librarians, archivists, and curators are seeking out the best ways to get started with digitizing their collections. They may be feeling pressure to “catch up” to larger organizations—indeed, according to a 2010 report by the Online Computer Library Center, one of the most challenging issues in special collections and archives was the “implicit mandate to put as much material as possible online, and as soon as possible” (Dooley and Luce 2010). If anything, this expectation has only grown stronger with time.

But can small and medium-sized institutions successfully follow the model of larger ones when it comes to digitization processes and workflows? In some ways the answer is yes, but in many ways it is no. While the basics may remain the same—scanning images, creating metadata, loading objects into a digital collections management system (DCMS)—the details of these activities, and the groundwork that must be laid in order to allow these activities to happen, may vary quite a bit between institutions of different sizes. This chapter looks at the ways in which digitization at smaller institutions is unique, and examines special considerations that may need to be taken into account by librarians, archivists, and curators when embarking on smaller-scale digitization projects. It also explores the advantages that smaller institutions may have when it comes to digitizing their collections.

Why Digitize?

But first things first—before we look too closely at the hows of smaller-scale digitization, let’s briefly discuss the whys. And what, exactly, do we mean when we say “digitization”? For our purposes, we will define digitization as the reformatting of physical or analog materials to create digital surrogates or facsimiles. This is done using technologies such as scanners and digital cameras. There are many types of materials that libraries, museums, and archives might choose to digitize, among them photographs and other types of images, manuscripts, maps, printed music, recorded music and oral histories, videos, slides, microfilm, and three-dimensional objects.

There are various reasons an institution may decide to digitize its holdings. In the early years of digital collection building, the emphasis was almost exclusively on access: to put digital materials online so they can be found and used, in order to make the materials more broadly, quickly, and efficiently accessible (Levy 2000). Increased accessibility continues to be a very important objective, particularly for collections that may be “hidden” or obscured from the public in their physical form, for example uncataloged or noncirculating archival materials. Allowing ubiquitous access to collections via the Web allows them to be discovered and utilized by a much broader audience than only those users who are willing and able to visit an institution to view its unique local holdings in person.

Digitization should, first and foremost, meet an institution’s obligation to make its collections accessible. However, Stephen Chapman makes the important distinction that making collections Internet-accessible is not the same as making them user-accessible. “Before emulating the policies and practices of a peer institution, ask whether its programs have been configured to serve comparable audiences and audience needs” (Chapman 2004). It may not be appropriate for a rural public library, for example, to model its selection and digitization strategies after that of a large research university, since its patron base will likely be quite different. Accessibility encompasses not just making material available in digital form, but understanding the organization’s users and the uses they will make of the available information.

A second reason to digitize is for preservation purposes. Creating digital surrogates can serve to indirectly protect fragile or brittle physical materials by providing an alternative means of access, thereby minimizing handling and further damage to the original (that is, if demand for the original item does not increase due to heightened awareness caused by the availability of the digital surrogate, a possible side effect). Digitization for preservation, as this approach is known, is not to be confused with digital preservation, which can essentially be defined as preservation practices that are applied to digital materials that are either born digital or reformatted from analog media. Digital preservation is an important step in the process of digitization, and one that will be discussed at length in chapter 9. It is important to note that digital surrogates should not be considered replacements for analog originals, which have intrinsic value and compared with which even the best-quality digital image represents a loss of information (Besser 2003).

Finally, there is the previously mentioned “added value” factor. Digitization can provide a means of enriching materials and collections with features that assist users in utilizing and understanding them in new and novel ways. This may be as straightforward as functionality that allows users to select digital objects across collections and save them into their own, personalized digital collections, or as sophisticated as text encoding that permits scholars to mine texts for new insights regarding their content and meaning. Data visualization is another way that digital materials can be brought to life, allowing users to better understand the context of a digital collection by placing the data in a visual context (think interactive graphs, charts, time lines, and maps). Digitization can create new ways for information to be displayed, analyzed, and understood that may be difficult or impossible in the original analog form.

Aside from these three basic goals, there are secondary objectives to be gained from digitization. As Terence K. Huwe points out, digital collections have the potential to create excitement among patrons, and the process of digitizing these collections can be a good way for institutions to attract funding, political support, and patron attention (Huwe 2013). Particularly for smaller organizations that serve the public sector, digitization of unique local holdings can be a smart public relations move and can further institutional goals to satisfy patron needs. This is to say nothing of patron expectations, of course. We live in an era when patrons may anticipate, and indeed demand, that information be made available to them in virtual form. This provides incentive for digitization projects, but it can also leave cultural heritage institutions stuck “somewhere in the middle . . . facing an audience which expects to step through a perfectly designed gateway into a virtual world where everything is available online” (Walsh 2013). This expectation can create particular challenges for small institutions that may already have significant hurdles to surmount when it comes to creating sustainable digitization programs.

Patrons are often surprised to learn that universal digitization has not been achieved for all or most library, archive, and museum content. After many years of hard work, even small institutions may have only a small percentage of their holdings converted to digital. It is important to remember that digitization is usually a slow and steady process that involves a good deal of design and planning prior to execution. Projects often take longer than originally anticipated, and a good rule of thumb when planning for new digitization initiatives is to allow for a time frame twice as long as initially projected. This is particularly true for first-time projects; as experience is gained, so also is speed. It is also generally the case that smaller institutions may see slower progress, at least at first, for reasons outlined later in the chapter.

When asking “Why digitize?” it is important to keep in mind the specific mission of the institution. As David M. Levy emphasizes, more information is not always better and digital libraries cannot be all things to all people (Levy 2000). In the same vein as Chapman’s emphasis on user accessibility, an academic library serving students and researchers may have very different motives and aims than a public library or museum when it comes to selecting materials for digitization, and overarching institutional goals should be adhered to when planning which items to digitize. Factors to consider include which items are perceived to have the most demand from the patron population and which items best reflect the unique holdings of the specific institution.

Digitization at Smaller Institutions: How It’s Unique

In his article “College Librarians and the University-Library Syndrome,” Evan Ira Farber observed a “pattern of attitudes which cause college librarians . . . to think of their libraries in terms of university libraries and imitate practices, attitudes and objectives” of these larger organizations (Farber 1974). This tendency Farber dubbed “university-library syndrome,” and he stressed that differences between these two types of institutions should be kept in mind if college libraries are to achieve their goals. Access to electronic information has narrowed the gulf between college and university libraries considerably since Farber wrote his article, but the “syndrome” he describes may be alive and well in another form in the era of digitization. It is tempting for librarians, archivists, and curators to look to larger institutions as models when embarking on their first forays into digital collection building. However, there are differences that must be kept in mind if smaller institutions are to achieve their digitization goals.

At the same time, there is the growing expectation that smaller institutions will provide the same level of service as larger ones, and this provides a unique challenge. In the area of academia, “small academic libraries are challenged to continue essential legacy services while ratcheting up new projects that will enable students and faculty to engage in twenty-first-century research and learning . . . Although resources for small college libraries pale in comparison to those at research university libraries, many of the same services are expected by faculty and students” (Doherty and Piper 2015). This is arguably the case for all types of cultural heritage institutions, where global online access to content has become the expectation of the public at large.

One commonality of smaller institutions is that they often have fewer resources when it comes to money, staff, and infrastructure. Successful digitization projects rely on all three of these elements, and a lack in any area can serve as a major hindrance to overall progress. Thus, smaller institutions often have to get creative when it comes to marshaling the resources necessary to digitize their collections. It is also the case that every individual digitization project is unique, and that resources will need to be allocated on a project-by-project basis. The three areas of money, staff, and infrastructure are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

MONEY

Money, or lack thereof, is a deciding factor in numerous aspects of digitization. Many small and midsized institutions must deal with less-than-adequate funding in multiple areas of operation, and this often carries over to digitization initiatives. Funding is perhaps the greatest challenge when it comes to these projects, as it affects every other aspect, including staffing and infrastructure. Money is needed to hire project staff, purchase scanning equipment, license necessary software, and arrange for short- and long-term digital file storage. Researching costs and determining that an adequate revenue stream is available prior to beginning a digitization project are essential first steps.

The good news is that digitization projects can be completed on a shoestring budget. In the lowest-cost scenario, an organization’s preexisting scanning technology can be repurposed for digital projects or a new flatbed scanner purchased for a reasonable cost; existing staff can be reassigned to digitization tasks; and free, open source software can be utilized to deliver digital objects and metadata to users. While this bare-bones approach is not always ideal, it is possible to create digital collections with a minimal outlay of monetary resources.

The bad news is that less money spent may lead to lower quality in the final product, and the bare-bones approach can sometimes create more problems than it solves. This will be illustrated in more depth in later chapters discussing DCMSs and digital preservation. But suffice it to say that many institutions choose to spend more than may seem strictly necessary because paying more, for example, for a commercial DCMS rather than a free option, can save time, headaches, and (yes) more money down the road. This is not an endorsement of one option over another, merely an acknowledgment that dealing with funding issues will inevitably lead to trade-offs that an institution will need to weigh carefully in the planning stages, and that will vary considerably due to individual institutional needs. A dispassionate and level-headed examination of necessary requirements versus desired features and functionalities, coupled with careful research into the available options, will set the stage for a project that makes successful use of available monetary resources.

One avenue that many smaller institutions pursue in order to address monetary shortfalls is to apply for grant funding. There are many funding opportunities available at the national, state, and local levels that can be used to seed a digitization project or program. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission are federal organizations that offer grant funding specifically for digitization initiatives. Private foundations that have an interest in the specific subject domain related to the materials you want to digitize may also be sources of funding (for example, you may be able to make a case to a national anthropological association for funding the digitization of a noted archaeologist’s field notes). When looking for grant funding, it is usually advisable to focus on discrete, one-time purchases such as scanning equipment or servers. This is because many costs related to digital collections are ongoing, for example software licenses and staff salaries, and once a grant ends it may be a challenge to replace funds for these continuing costs with those from a homegrown source. Keep in mind, though, that hardware and equipment will also need to be replaced at some point in the future.

Unfortunately, grant funding for digitization may be more difficult to secure in the current climate than it once was. Marshall Breeding argues that digitizing collections is no longer an especially “noteworthy” activity, and that libraries seeking external funding for digitizing will have to work harder than ever to present a convincing argument (Breeding 2014). For this reason, it is a wise goal to make digitization activities part of the regular organizational budget, rather than relying too heavily on outside sources of funding. However, grant monies can be invaluable for getting your digitization program off the ground.

A cost-saving path that a large number of smaller institutions follow is to join a local, regional, state, or national consortium. The ability to share costs across multiple institutions is a highly appealing prospect, and for some small institutions this cost-sharing may be the deciding factor that enables them to pursue any digitization program at all. There are many reasons why the consortium route is advantageous for small and medium-sized institutions, and these are looked at more closely in chapter 4, which examines cross-institutional collaboration.

STAFFING

Following funding, staffing is perhaps t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Managing Projects
• Part II: Basic Skills
• Glossary
• Index