Selection

Selecting Materials for Digitization

• Select materials that highlight the strengths of your department's collection or are frequently requested by scholars.

• Select materials that form a coherent collection. Preferably all the items should share proximity in storage.

• Select materials that already have some metadata compiled for them.

• Select materials that will not require time spent investigating copyright and privacy issues.

• Select a project that is within your department's budget for student wages, external curation services, and office supplies.

• Scope the project so it can be accomplished quickly enough to meet your needs?

• Selecting materials that need to be transcribed can delay production by months or years.

• When you have selected the materials to digitize, request a meeting of the Digitization Production Team to fill out the Library Digital Collections Project Digitization Form to identify what tasks need to be performed to prepare you materials for digitization. For more on these tasks see "Curation."

Resources

• A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections (NISO, 2008)
  http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/framework3.pdf (accessed September 30, 2013)