Home | Digitisation (Summary)
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SCOPE
This guideline covers the issues raised by the digitisation process including: Government policy initiatives, planning, IPR, file formats, hardware and software, resource description, protection of images, workflow, costs, staffing, delivery systems, evaluation, OCR.

POLICY ISSUES
The digitisation of ‘traditional’ materials – print, images etc. – is a supportive process to Europe-wide efforts to capture and create digital cultural heritages and thus an essential contributor to eEurope. Libraries are increasingly working with other ‘memory institutions’, such as museums and galleries, to create digitised materials and to make them widely available to their clienteles. All sectors of the population may benefit. The development of digitisation programmes offers opportunities for public libraries to involve citizens who may not previously have used their services, and in particular to encourage citizens to become active and skilled participants in exploiting the opportunities of the networked world in which we now live. It can be argued that ownership of content, and the skills to create new content, are key to prosperity in this new world.

Because of issues such as complexity, scalability (use by large numbers of people) and sustainability (long-term viability and hence value for investment) it is becoming increasingly obvious that in the future it will be necessary to design and manage public networked information services on at least a national basis. The planning of such services is well-advanced in some countries (e.g. Denmark, UK). A major issue will be to ensure that public libraries play a full part in such developments; their digitised collections will be extremely important as a contribution to the national digital wealth.

GOOD PRACTICE GUIDELINES
The process of digitisation is superficially simple, since an inexpensive PC and scanner can be used with standard software to create a digital copy of any human-readable artefact. However, when issues such as the quality of the resulting image, the format used to store it, its description, its intended use and its preservation are considered, the process becomes much more complex. The very simplicity of the basic process can lead policy makers and inexperienced practitioners into a false belief that a digitisation programme will be straightforward and inexpensive. It will be neither. Above all, the digitisation programme must be properly planned and competently managed from start to finish.

The delivery of digitised materials to the end-users can be relatively straightforward, since the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web has provided the infrastructure, software and technical standards needed. Again, however, the very ease with which the Web can be accessed masked some of the underlying difficulties. For example, if images are not simply to be given away, complex software and procedures may be needed to collect revenue and to guard against infringement against intellectual property rights. Moreover, as soon as a large number of images comes into being, the organisation of the collection becomes a major issue - just as a library must ensure that the books on its shelves are in some kind of order, so too the digitised images must be placed in categories and described systematically using standard terminology if individual images are to be found by users.

FUTURE AGENDA
The future agenda regarding digitisation in public libraries will be heavily dependent on the actions taken in response to policy issues. In particular, collaboration should result in the more widespread adoption of standards which will make interoperability between collections feasible. The ideal will be a situation in which the end user can search for any digitised image and view, download and use that image without having to know where the collection is based or having to make any adjustments to his/her desktop. This applies not just to adoption of technical standards but also to the reconciliation of rights issues.

Home | Digitisation (Summary)
Full Text: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4