Digitization

Digitization is the process by which hardcopy resources are made digital. This includes scanning, digitally photographing, and digitally encoding analog signals from magnetic tape and other recording technologies. In this workshop, attendees will learn about digitization equipment and best practices for books, papers, photographs, sound, and video recordings from an archival perspective (which may not be sufficient for all research needs!) and what goes into post-digitization processing. Digitization also implies online, long term, high quality access, which requires us to think about the broader context of how items are selected for digitization, where and how digitized resources are hosted, pitfalls in assumptions of access and completeness of materials, rights management, and digital preservation. Digitization is only step 1 in managing digital assets, but all steps before and after may have profound impacts on what and how digital scholarship can happen.