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As digitization moves from small, discrete projects, conducted within individual institutions, to larger, multi-departmental, multi-institutional and international digital programs, collaboration becomes an increasingly vital consideration. The funding, creation, access and sustainability of digital surrogates increasingly depend on arrangements in which institutions work with others. These may range from relatively simple cooperative arrangements to collaborations where partners develop a common goal and input resources jointly. They may also include working with consultants, paid or unpaid, who contribute specialized expertise but are not closely involved with project planning, or using outside agencies to accomplish specific segments of the project. This section of the Guide uses the term “collaborate” in the broad sense of any type of cooperative or partnership relationship.
Our interviews revealed that all the projects and programs that are establishing good practice in all areas of digitization already collaborate on various levels. As they improve their understanding of their collections and the digitization process, they increasingly recognize that collaboration has a crucial role to play. It quickly enables a team to widen its subject base, increase its available expertise, and leverage its equipment, human, and financial resources (see Section II on Project Planning).
Collaboration and cooperation have always played an important role in the cultural heritage sector, from international art exhibitions to simple inter-library loans for academic establishments. Fruitful use and understanding of our heritage depends on such collaboration. Digitization extends this rationale, and provides more efficient ways of improving access and increasing scholarship.
Any digital program starting out should explore all the possible layers of collaboration and also understand the advantages and possible difficulties that any collaboration can hold.
Institutions seeking to create digital versions of their collections may not consider collaborating as a necessary, or even desirable, option. Their aim may be quite limited and local in its scope: for instance, to digitize a particular section of a collection for a specific research purpose or a specific teaching task, where collaboration seems like an unnecessary complication. However, collaboration does not necessarily entail large-scale partnership over a number of years, but can be as simple as seeking advice and adopting standards that will streamline the current project and enable future collaborations. In these cases, the advantages may lie in the greater breadth of experience applied to the project—an asset under any circumstances—or, more importantly, in ensuring that the local collection can interoperate effectively with related resources elsewhere. Collaboration may also help solve problems of permissions or digital rights management, by grouping together organizations with a common interest and giving them greater leverage when negotiating with rights-holders. For instance, Georgetown University encountered resistance from publishers when seeking permission to digitize critical editions of philosophical works. However, once the university joined with professional organizations such as the Hegel Society of America, they were able to negotiate successfully for digitization rights.
Collaboration does not necessarily entail large-scale partnership over a number of years, but can be as simple as seeking advice and adopting standards that will enable future collaborations.
Funding may also play an important role in encouraging collaboration. Seeking funding is a critical and time-consuming aspect of any digital project or program, from identifying likely funding sources to writing complex bids and complying with funders' guidelines and requirements. Sharing this work may be advantageous, particularly for smaller institutions. Increasingly, the major funders in Europe and in North America are seeking collaborative programs for successful digital projects. The purpose may be to exploit the full capacity of digitization, to unite geographically disparate collections and improve access, as well as to enhance partnership between institutions. It may be that collaboration is a necessary—or at least a highly desirable—aspect of any successfully funded program. The projects we interviewed all agreed that collaboration was absolutely necessary to achieve the depths of digitization that they desire for their collections.
There are many kinds of collaboration, ranging from simple consultancy to sharing skills or equipment, outsourcing, and fully-fledged multi-institutional international projects. Collaboration can take place locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. All these forms of collaboration require an understanding of the issues and careful planning and management.
Many projects seek the advice of consultants. One typical approach involves identifying a suitable company or person to visit the project, discuss the tasks involved, and produce a feasibility study or similar document on how the project should proceed. Consultants do not necessarily have to be external; in a large institution, there may be internal experts who can offer advice on planning, creating and sustainability at the beginning of any project. Generally, it is a good idea to seek this internal advice before applying for funding to ensure that the bid is as complete and precise as possible. However, not all institutions have access internally to such expertise and may seek external advice. Remember that external advice will be costly and funders may have reservations about permitting feasibility studies unless they have been specified in the bid. It is worth exploring funders’ attitudes to such costs in advance. Advice from an internal source may be negotiated in a more relaxed manner, perhaps with specific advice on funding bids and purchasing technical equipment. If you will need advice regularly from these internal sources throughout the project, then you may have to factor some sort of payment for recovery of salary costs. It is worthwhile exploring your institution to discover what expertise exists. It may also be possible to create a support group of similar projects that can work together, creating an institutional policy that can be applied to new projects, thus saving costs in time and staffing.
Any contract with an external consultant must be well prepared and managed throughout the process to ensure that the deliverables, such as a feasibility study, are produced on time and meet the specifications. This will take more time and cost more than you may anticipate, so think carefully about whether the costs of seeking professional external advice will actually achieve the goals you set. You may find you can reduce costs by using consultants who are located close to you, to reduce costs in travel and phone calls. However, one specialist notes that this could constrain one from getting the right person for the job, particularly if the expertise you seek is rare. A large-scale, multi-institutional project in the U.S. might serve its needs very well by bringing in an expert from the UK, for example, to help plan workflows or to train key staff. It is also advisable to seek references on any institution or company you plan to consult. Staff in universities, libraries and other institutions within the cultural heritage sector will be able to act as consultants or make recommendations. There are other avenues of expertise that projects can explore, such as this Guide, or other resources created by the community. Make use of the listservs and newsgroups to seek such advice. The Research Libraries Group (RLG) and NINCH have web pages that will help.
The most likely collaboration is one that involves more than one project from more than one institution and then generally within the same sector. These projects use the expertise and skills from similar institutions or departments. The Making of America is one such project, involving the University of Michigan and Cornell University. The project describes this ongoing collaboration as follows:
“Drawing on the depth of primary materials at the Michigan and Cornell libraries, these two institutions are developing a thematically-related digital library documenting American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. At the University of Michigan, approximately 1,600 books and ten journals with imprints primarily between 1850 and 1877 were selected, scanned, and made available through the present system. Librarians, researchers, and instructors continue to work together to determine the content of this digital library and to evaluate the impact of this resource on research and teaching at both institutions.” (http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/about.html)
As a highly successful project that involved collaboration at all levels and at all stages of the digital process, The Making of America is worth further investigation if your institution is looking for a collaboration model to follow.
The impetus for collaboration comes from a number of directions. Funding decisions are frequently made on the basis of the skills and resources available at an institution. Even large institutions may not have all of the skills and expertise required entirely in-house. Smaller institutions may only have their collections and specialist subject knowledge to offer. Even if institutions have sufficient capacity for digital content creation, the capacity required for effective delivery and sustainability may only be found at larger institutions or through pooling resources. Some digital projects will require a critical mass of content to begin with and others will require that their content be scalable in order to be sustainable. As digital projects give way to digital programs, particularly for delivery, the need to collaborate increases. Indeed, underpinning the widespread and convenient delivery of digital content is the need to adopt common standards and practices, which itself drives collaboration. In today's digital landscape the individual, entrepreneurial start-up has given way to the age of partnerships and mergers.
Underpinning the widespread and convenient delivery of digital content is the need to adopt common standards and practices, itself a driver of collaboration.
Digitization projects can collaborate in a wide variety of ways. Collaboration may involve the pooling of resources, or the sharing of content; it may operate at the institutional, local, regional, national or international levels; it may exist within or across sector boundaries; and it may involve formal or informal relationships. None of these types of collaboration in best in the abstract; different types will suit different projects and will affect the partners in different ways. Nevertheless, a number of trends are evident.
The library and museum fields offer fertile opportunities for cross-sector collaboration. The enhanced functionality that web delivery can provide, and users frequently expect, requires an increased amount of interpretative information. Museums and galleries are well versed in providing succinct information on the selected parts of their collections on display while libraries and archives have traditionally concentrated on providing users with access information to their entire holdings. Web delivery demands a combination of these elements: comprehensive descriptive information to facilitate resource discovery, and access and supplementary contextual information to aid interpretation. Cross sector collaboration in physical resources, personnel, skills and experience can thus greatly benefit both parties.
For many smaller institutions some form of content collaboration may be the only method by which their collections can be digitized cost effectively.
The ability of the web to deliver still images, text, moving images, audio and 3D representations offers another opportunity for digital content creators to provide new ways of accessing collections. Traditionally, researchers would access sources across physically dispersed collections that may be distinguished by the type, subject or provenance of the material held. Even if the digital representations of these collections remain distributed (and the distributed collaborative model is a common one) the opportunity to provide a unified point of access, and hence distribution, greatly enhances the functionality for users and the dissemination objectives of collection holders. Although the educational benefit of access to digital collections is often presumed rather than evaluated it is clear that a single point of access to interrelated and previously unobtainable resources makes the learning experience more efficient if nothing else. The institutional emphasis on education, particularly in the K-12 sector, makes such content collaboration a major consideration.
For many smaller institutions, some form of content collaboration may be the only method by which their collections can be digitized cost-effectively. The collaboration may take the form of licensing rights to a commercial organization in return for creating digital content, or providing access to collections to a larger non-profit institution. Even if projects can afford to undertake the actual digital conversion themselves, issues such as copyright and intellectual property rights, electronic access controls and effective delivery and asset management systems may be beyond their financial and personnel capabilities. Lastly, the ongoing delivery and preservation of digital content raises issues that lie beyond the scope of even the largest institution and require the collaboration of the whole cultural heritage sector if they are to be addressed effectively.
There seems to be no predominant pattern in the level at which collaboration should take place. However, smaller organizations do seem to require either a major institutional partner to act as a catalyst or a partnership with enough similar-sized organizations to gain critical mass. In both these cases a formal collaborative arrangement would be most appropriate. Collaborative groups of any size can bring in expertise less formally by including specialists on their advisory boards.
Outsourcing is a growing method of creating digital resources. Projects or programs will identify a vendor (usually through a request for proposals or RFP), negotiate a contract and give the vendor access to the material from digitization and to metadata creation, indexing and cataloging. This is a very simplistic view of the process; there are a number of factors that must be taken into consideration before approaching a vendor to ensure that both parties understand the process and agree on the outcomes. Outsourcing can be done on-site as well as off-site; in the former case the vendor will bring equipment and staff to the material. This may or may not be more costly, since the vendor avoids a whole range of infrastructure costs, but may have additional travel costs.
Vendors are increasing their knowledge of the types of documents in this sector and are now purchasing the specialist equipment to handle them. However, you should ensure that any vendor you are approaching understands the nature of your material. Scanning 10,000 business documents, on good quality laser print, is very different from handling 10,000 fourteenth-century church records on different types of material and of varying sizes. Show the vendor a sample of the more difficult material to ensure that they have the requisite expertise and appropriate equipment. You should also ask them to produce sample scans of some of your material to help you assess their abilities.
Make sure that the quality of work produced is of the standard required. This Guide has sections on standards for resolution, tonal range, color depth, and other variables (see Sections V, VI and VII). Quality control and assurance (QC&A) is a vital part of any agreement with a vendor (see Section VIII). The actual terms of the agreement will depend on cost and the vendor’s capabilities. It is expensive to check every image, and depending upon the nature of material and how you are processing it checking a sample of the digital products may be sufficient, but do not neglect quality control and assurance as a cost saving measure. Agree with the vendor on a guaranteed level of quality control of the process(es) they will provide and require that they have quality assurance procedures in place. The only secure way for you to ensure that the agreed level of quality has been reached is to conduct a check on the output once it has been returned to your organization. For instance, check one in ten images and if any error (such as skew) is found in a specified batch, then that whole batch should be returned to the vendor to be digitized again. For obvious reasons, you should be sure to stipulate such quality assurance conditions in advance.
The most immediate benefit of using a vendor is that once the costs have been agreed, you are protected against unexpected cost increases as these would normally be carried by the vendor. This condition must be stated explicitly in the contract. Establishing a comprehensible and workable contract is an essential stage in the outsourcing process; if it is carefully worked out (using lawyers where possible), then outsourcing can be a great benefit to an institution.
Many projects in the survey reported that they had been reluctant to use outside vendors because of the nature of their material and a lack of confidence in the capability of commercial services to appreciate the conservation, handling, and content issues. Increasingly, though, commercial companies have realized that the cultural heritage sector has funds available for the creation of digital content. Firms with digital imaging experience are investing in the expertise and facilities that allows the sector to entrust them with the digital process.
Nevertheless, outsourcing should be avoided when it requires rare and fragile material to be sent off-site. In these instances, a vendor should set up digitizing stations on-site so that the materials do not have to be moved. Generally, using vendors is most successful where the material is in good condition and of consistent type and quality. Variations in size and quality will cause the vendor as many problems as they would cause the project team, but vendors rarely have the content and conservation expertise to respond to these difficulties.
Do not underestimate the complexity of getting the analog material from storage to the vendor, having it returned to the institution after scanning, then checking it and returning it to storage. Catalogers and conservators should be involved in this process. The latter will be especially helpful if there are questions as to how material should be packaged, shipped or handled by the vendor. The operation should be planned, managed, and documented to suit the whole collection as well as the material to be digitized.
As increasing the volume of material to be digitized should reduce the per-unit costs, it is always worth asking at the planning stage whether extending the project would be sensible. Collaboration between projects within the same institution will also help reduce per-unit digitization costs by providing access to increased volumes of material.
Outsourcing is thus a viable option but one that requires building a solid relationship with a trusted vendor and managing every step to ensure the highest quality result.
The success of any collaborative venture lies in its management, with firm aims and objectives set out for all partners. Goals and deadlines must be fixed, agreed and adhered to. Employing a project manager to take overall responsibility for ensuring that all partners deliver the work agreed is a distinct advantage. It is also worth ensuring that all partners are doing work that is appropriate to the level of skills and resources available to them. Establishing effective methods and mechanisms of communication between members of the consortium has always proved a challenge for collaborative initiatives. You should work to build good, well-documented channels for communication and decision-making, which involve all of the relevant participants.
All this should be set out clearly in a Partnership Agreement, and the more comprehensive it is, the more likely the project will be a success. The Agreement should make explicit the role(s) and responsibilities of each partner. It should differentiate between those activities that a partner will carry out in support of achieving their local project obligations and those that a partner must complete for the group as a whole (such as local training or dependable file access). The Agreement should be signed by director-level staff to ensure that ‘project buy-in’ has taken place at a senior-enough level in the organization.
Where you are working in a multi-institution collaboration, a consortium policy can make explicit the responsibilities of the central agent. The central agent is the institution that manages the initiative’s financial resources; other sites involved are partners. It is crucial to examine which functions will be centralized and which will be de-centralized and thus under local control. For instance, will training take place locally or will it all be centralized? Will standards of QC&A and metadata creation be defined locally or centrally? Will the texts be stored on a central server for cross-resource searching? Will the digital images be stored centrally, or locally, or both? Some of these questions have obvious answers, but answers to others will vary depending upon the circumstances, material, and nature of the partnership. The Colorado Digitization Project (CDP), for example, has centralized training sessions for all partners and stores the texts and images on a centralized server that all partners can search; some partners also hold the images locally, with the CDP acting as a depository and collections manager. The MOAC project, based in Berkeley, stores all EAD and MOA2 XML documents centrally for searching by all the partners but these records link to images that are stored locally on each museum’s server.
Further examples of the issues that must be addressed include the following:
These questions, and others, should be addressed at the start of any project. This will help forestall any problems or misunderstandings that might occur later in the process.
The Partnership Agreement applies to the funding and publicity stages of the project just as much as it does to the creation and usage of material. Issues to consider at this stage are:
The Colorado Digitization Project (CDP) is an excellent example of how various partners can come together, combining their talents, resources and collections in such a way that all partners are satisfied with the management and organization of the collaboration.
Collaborations such as this enable large-scale digital programs to realize the full potential of digitization. The CDP brings together a variety of institutions from the state of Colorado with the aim of producing a digital resource that encapsulates material from the collections of museums and libraries throughout the state. A member of the CDP staff acts as the project manager, assisting and advising the projects, as well as setting minimum standards for creating images and metadata. Skills and resources are shared through training sessions and scanning laboratories located throughout Colorado. The laboratories provide a critical link in the chain because they house the technical equipment needed to enable the participation of projects from smaller institutions. The project enables both large public libraries with state-of-the-art equipment and small local museums with no equipment at all to collaborate in creating a high quality digital resource. Overall management of the digital resource is controlled from a central point, but this is crucial to the success of any collaborative project; no matter how large or small the contribution of the institution is, the goals and deliverables must be agreed upon to ensure the initiative’s success.
A successful collaboration depends on establishing guidelines and creating standards that all partners adhere to. These guidelines will cover such areas as definition of types and depth of metadata, descriptive terminology or control vocabulary, file formats (whether for images, audio or video), standards for interface design, and guidelines for QC&A. This rule applies to all collaborations, whether between two departments in a single institution or as part of a multi-institutional, international project.
It is also important to apply long-term thinking to collaborations and to recognize that it may be beneficial to participate in more than one type of collaboration, so as to maximize each partnership. It is also advisable to think about the life-cycle of a collaboration and the conditions that might bring it to a graceful close. For instance, does the collaboration have an expiration date? If not, is there a date when all agreements are revisited? Has an exit strategy been devised for each partner as well as for the central agency? These questions have to be considered if an institution means to make the best of its collections and resources and ensure that they remain accessible in the future.
Successful collaboration can enable scattered collections to be reunited as well as producing materials that enhance and complement each other, providing rich digital resources for the users.
Key factors to consider when starting a project: