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Early developers of digital resources often had little thought for how their projects might dovetail with others. Today many of these projects suffer from this lack of forethought; they cannot be extended for broader use, they cannot be built upon by others and the chances are slim that they will survive into the future. More recently, the cultural community has begun to realize the importance of applying technical and information standards intelligently and consistently. The use of such standards not only adds longevity and scalability to the project’s life cycle, but also enables an ever widening public to discover and use its digital resources.
One of the goals of this Guide to Good Practice is to show the critical importance for the community of moving beyond the narrow vision of these early project-based enthusiasts and thinking through what is needed to establish sustainable programs. By adopting community shared good practice, project designers can ensure the broadest use of their materials, today and in the future, by audiences they may not even have imagined and by future applications that will dynamically recombine ‘digital objects’ into new resources. They can ensure the quality, consistency and reliability of a project’s digital resources and make them compatible with resources from other projects and domains, building on the work of others. Such projects can be produced economically and can be maintained and managed into the future with maximum benefit for all. In short, good practice can be measured by any one project’s ability to maximize a resource’s intended usefulness while minimizing the cost of its subsequent management and use.
By adopting community shared good practice, project designers can ensure the broadest use of their materials, today and in the future, by audiences they may not even have imagined and by future applications that will dynamically recombine “digital objects” into new resources.
Within the cultural and educational communities, there are today many different types of guides to good practice written for particular disciplines, institution types or specific standards. These include the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, Cornell University Library’s Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives, the Digital Library Federation’s Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging, the Getty Trust’s Introduction to Vocabularies and Introduction to Metadata and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service series of discipline-based “Guides to Good Practice.” In creating the National Digital Library, the Library of Congress has been assiduous in providing documentation and discussion of its practices; similarly, the National Archives has published its internal “Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access,” and the Colorado Digitization Project has brought together in a web portal a wide-ranging collection of administrative, technical, copyright and funding resources.
Existing Good Practice Guides
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (Text Encoding Initiative): http://www.tei-c.org
Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives (Cornell University Library): http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/dila.html
Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging (Digital Library Federation): http://www.rlg.org/visguides/
Introduction to Vocabularies (The Getty Trust): http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/vocabulary/introvocabs/
Introduction to Metadata (The Getty Trust): http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/intrometadata/
“Guides to Good Practice” (Arts and Humanities Data Service): http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/goodguides/g2gp.html
“Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access” (National Archives): http://www.nara.gov/nara/vision/eap/digguide.pdf
Various documentation from the Colorado Digitization Project: http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/toolbox.html
The Library of Congress has published many supportive materials; some notable resources include:
“Challenges to Building an Effective Digital Library”: http://memory. loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/cbedl.html,
“Technical Notes by Type of Material”: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/document.html
“Background Papers and Technical Information”: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftpfile.html
“Manuscript Digitization Demonstration Project, Final Report”: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pictel/
“Lessons Learned: National Digital Library Competition”: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/award/lessons/lessons.html
“Conservation Implications of Digitization Projects”: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/techdocs/conservation.html
Put simply, this plethora of information is daunting. Where does one start and how does one evaluate the relevance of any particular text in the growing corpus of material on project planning, digitization, the kinds of metadata that need to be included in any project, and the maintenance and preservation of digital resources?
As we detail below, the NINCH Guide has a good claim to being unique in providing a broad platform for reviewing these many individual statements. First, it is a community-wide document, created and directed by a NINCH Working Group culled from practitioners from digitization programs in different types of institutions (museums, libraries, archives, the arts and academic departments) dealing in different disciplines and different media. Second, it is based on a set of broad guiding principles for the creation, capture and management of networked cultural resources. And finally, it is also based on a set of intensive interviews of substantial digitization programs in the U.S. and abroad. The perspective is thus a new one.
By offering universal access to the knowledge this research brings together, the Guide should help to level the playing field, enabling newcomers to the field and projects which are smaller, either in terms of budget or scope, to offer resources that are as valid, practical and forward-thinking as projects that are created within information- and resource-rich institutions. It is this sharing of knowledge that truly facilitates the survival and success of digital resources.
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a US-based coalition of some 100 organizations and institutions from across the cultural sector: museums, libraries, archives, scholarly societies, arts groups, IT support units and others. It was founded in 1996 to ensure strong and informed leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment. Our task and goal, as a leadership and advocacy organization, is to build a framework within which these different elements can effectively collaborate to build a networked cultural heritage.
Realizing from the start the importance of connecting the big picture (the overall vision and goals for a networked cultural heritage) with actual practice within cultural institutions, NINCH board and staff concluded that organizing a comprehensive Guide to Good Practice was an important priority. A NINCH Best Practices Working Group was created in October 1998 to organize a review and evaluation of current practice and to develop a set of principles and guidelines for good practice in the digital representation and management of cultural heritage.
The Group proposed an initial definition of good practice by distilling six core principles from their own experience with a set of evaluative criteria to judge current practice. The Group thus proposed that Good Practice will:
With funding from the Getty Grant Program, NINCH issued a request for proposals to conduct a survey and write the Guide, in close collaboration with the Working Group. A team organized by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) of The University of Glasgow was hired.
In order to ground the Guide in the reality of good practice that has been proven in the field, and to ensure that the personal views of the Working Group did not color the guide too much, the project began with a thorough review of current literature on the subject of good practice that included online and print resources, as well as gray[1] literature. This process was complemented by structured face-to-face and telephone interviews, and selective written exchanges with individuals from the cultural heritage sector.
The key information-gathering tool used for research was the Digitization Data Collection Instrument for Site Visit Interviews developed by HATII. For details on the development and use of this interview instrument see the “Introduction” to the Interview Reports. Interviews at digitization facilities lasted between 90 minutes and 3 hours and were conducted by four researchers on 20 site visits, involving 36 projects and 68 individuals from late 2000 through early 2001.
Sites were selected on a “best fit” basis to a matrix of project types and key themes established by the project team. The sites selected were not a scientific or representative sample, but as a group they broadly reflected the diversity of the community, while each represented one or more of the identified key themes of good practice. The rationale for site selection is further explained in the “Introduction” to the Interview Reports.
In parallel to the site visits, the research team undertook further focused research via literature review, telephone interviews and written correspondence on several broad themes: text encoding, digital preservation, asset management, rights management, and quality assurance. HATII identified another set of relevant digitization sites for inclusion in this stage of research. Theme reports written out of this research filled knowledge gaps that had not been addressed by the site visits and provided a more analytical view of current community good practice in these areas.
The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials is a unique contribution to the field. It takes a process-oriented approach to the digitization and management of cultural resources (keeping in mind their long-term life cycle from selection through preservation) and does so from a community-wide perspective. NINCH also intends to put into place a system for regular updates and further editions. The Guide takes the reader from the identification of available resources and the selection of material, through the creation of digital content, to its preservation and sustained access. For institutions that have not yet begun digitally representing material from their collections or making their born digital material accessible, the Guide will provide a way of coming up to speed in a quickly developing area. It identifies the decisions that need to be made, indicates when they need to be made and draws attention to the implications of the possible choices.
Users of the Guide will come from different backgrounds. Perhaps five examples will help you situate yourself among the possible categories of readers.
If you are an archivist, librarian or museum professional, the Guide will help you select materials from your collections, reformat them, and make them visible and accessible to different audiences via the Internet or on portable digital media.
If you are a funder, the Guide will give you an understanding of the activities involved in creating, delivering and sustaining digital content and background, and will help you to assess whether or not requests for funding are sensible and built on a thorough consideration of the issues.
If you are an academic or other researcher, the Guide should give you sufficient information to design a project, convince collection owners to grant you access to material you need to digitize, and persuade funders to support your project.
If you are a teacher of digitization in a library school or a faculty of information studies, the Guide can help you identify central issues to cover in digitization courses, and can provide your students with an understanding of the issues that they will need to address when they join a cultural heritage institution.
If you are a vendor or manufacturer of software or hardware, the Guide should provide you with an indication of the challenges faced by the cultural community and of the significant levels of investment that the community is making in digital content creation, as well as showing you the tremendous value of the intellectual capital with which they are working.
This is not a recipe book for experts or specialists. It will provide content owners and decision-makers with sufficient guidance to know whether or not they are getting the best advice from their technical staff and whether their colleagues have put in place adequate strategies to guarantee the success of their digitization activities. It does not attempt to provide the final word on every topic, but instead supplies links to resources that we have evaluated and have concluded will offer a good next step.
The Guide identifies the decisions that need to be made, indicates when they need to be made and draws attention to the implications of choices made.
Humanities and cultural heritage institutions serve the needs of many different communities - from students and scholars to publishers and the general public. As you begin to develop and plan the use of digitization to make your collections visible and accessible, it is crucial to decide which audiences you aim to reach. This will influence many of your decisions: the items you select for digitization, the technologies you will use, and the mechanisms for delivering the digital materials to users. You may find, for example, that you have a collection that interests children as well as adults, but that each audience will require different delivery interfaces. While you could use the same technologies to reformat the material (and you would only need to do it once), and publish both versions using the same underlying delivery system, you would have to develop two separate interfaces to the same material.
Digitization may even change your sense of audience, by making it possible to offer broader access to rare or inaccessible collections. Institutions often think first about digitizing material that is already popular with the public, but digital technologies now enable them to offer access to material that could not otherwise be seen or used, thus altering rather than simply reproducing the existing profile of use.
Audiences may be not only the users of the digital collections you produce, but also potential creators of digital surrogates from your collection for research, publication, advertising or enjoyment. Examples might be:
an academic asking to digitize a collection of papers by a recently deceased contemporary artist as part of a research project
a publisher proposing to produce a pay-per-view website with images of your collection of sixteenth-century engravings of native Americans
a folk society requesting permission to include a rare recording of a 20th century storytelling from your collection on a CD they hope to release.
How do you respond to these requests?
What best practices would you require if you were to agree to any or all of them?
Would your expectations of each project be different or would you set them the same high standards?
How would you ensure that, while you allow them each to use the material for their different purposes, you retain control of it in digital form, and that the processes involved in its digitization do not put the analog material at risk?
It is worth remembering that analog holdings constitute intellectual capital, and that as digital surrogates are created, the research, teaching or economic value of the originals should not be depleted. This may affect the material you choose to make accessible, the standard to which you do so, and what types of use and access arrangements you will put in place. Requiring those who work with your collections to follow good practices can minimize risks to the analog sources through their digitization.
So the first questions to ask include:
Where is the audience for my collections?
What types of individuals does that audience include?
Will digitization enable me to meet the needs of existing communities better?
Will digitization enable me to create new audiences for both the digital surrogates and the analog sources?
What do I mean by “audience” in the digital world? Am I referring only to those individuals to whom I can deliver digital materials or am I also giving consideration to those who would like to produce digital surrogates for business, personal and research purposes?
[1] Gray literature, sometimes called "ephemeral literature," is unpublished material that can be lost to potential readers because it is not disseminated widely through publication or indexing. Examples of gray literature include: government or NGO research reports, workshop or conference papers, and theses.