Posted on February 14, 2011
My concern is with the important of Policy #1, the first of the 27 policies outlined in the policy document. This policy directs the stakeholder institutions towards 'Getting Digitisation Done' and the key and urgent action is for institutions to create their own digitization strategy.
The policy does not recommend a 'one-size-fits-all' strategy, not does it specifically prescribe a set of parameters on national priorities that all institutions should follow, but rather recognizes the autonomy of the institutions and requires each institution to create and make public their strategies. In effect, this means that every institution may itself then be subject to scrutiny by its stakeholders and by the public at large on the basis of a strategy which fits within a national standard.
This national standard for such digitization strategies is provided as a set of minimum information elements that must to be included. Within this article I am explaning and expanding on these elements within the constraints of the space I have been allocated.
I am also using some of the ideas as I presented at the SAMA conference in the balmy winter of Durban in September 2010 in which I offered a view of a digitization strategy as a series of choices, many of which are in the form of locating the institution on a spectrum of extreme positions.
Know what you have
You need to discover that you have in terms of collections and their significance and the extent to which they have been digitized to date. This would also include an understanding of the threats to the physical collections, since the policy recommends prioritizing the digitization of collections under threat.
Another relevant analysis is that concerning the usage of the collections, and the impact of handling on the risks to damage and loss of items. This is particularly relevant to rare archives which are irreplaceable. Highly-requested items should also be identified as the policy also makes the recommendation that frequently used items are prioritized to digitization.
In many cases, the custodial institutions do not own the collections they have, and may not have identified the rights associated with these, and the strategy should include what rights are held and how these rights should be managed. For example, is there permission from the rights owners to digitize, and what rights should be allocated and to whom in terms of the digital reproductions?
Know your users
Most institutions will have a good understanding of their users, both current and future, and should classify the users into segments in order to understand their needs better and to see how they could benefit from access to digital objects. This will also be relevant to determining the access methods that could be used to the digital objects and collections, such as whether this is through the web, through DVDs, through kiosk-based computers, or through mobile phones. As technology changes new access devices will be introduced, and I would like to echo my points made in my previous article on the significance of tablets in our computing future. Since I wrote that, only 3 weeks ago, many major manufacturers, including HP and ASUS, have announced new tablets.
Determine your selection principles and rules
There are so many different types of collections, representing all forms of history and heritage, that it is clearly not possible to dictate a single set of rules that are universally acceptable. It is also apparent that every curator, archivist and librarian is making decisions on selection as a core part of their work in dealing with physical items. However, this primary selection is performed in terms of what should be considered as valuable within the collections and what is not needed, and thus a selection for the purpose is digitization is using the collection of valued items and then determining within this collection what items are more valuable than others.
For this reason, it is important to be explicit about the rules that will be used to determine priorities for digitization in the scenario that it is rarely possible to fund the digitization of entire collections.
Describing the digital items and collections
The outcome of any digitization project is a set of digital objects, and it is important to be specific about the format, media and metadata which will form the digital collection. These should be in line with the recommendations made within the Digital Heritage Body of Knowledge, a separate output of the National Policy on Digitisation.
These digital objects should also be housed in a repository, and the strategy should identify which repository should be used as the permanent home of the digital masters produced.
The Process of Digitisation
Understanding the collections and specifying the rules of selection and the required output formats and media will help to define the action plan for digitization in terms of programmes and projects.
We consider programmes to be longer-terms in duration and focusing on the stakeholders who will be impacted, and how they will benefit from the programme deliverables. The programmes define a business case in which money can be spent to achieve the outcomes, and in general there will be a host of candidate programmes to choose from when defining a widely agreed strategy.
Projects should be defined as short-term actions, with a clear start, middle and end, and focusing on creation of specific digital collections, as a step towards the programme outcomes and the strategy benefits.
Within the specification of programmes and projects, it is important to identify who will undertake the project tasks. This also opens up the decision on whether to develop skills in-house or to outsource the entire project, as well as the decision on what facilities and equipment should be created to support digitization as a long-term focus. With the increasing important of digitization to the heritage community as a whole, these skills will become core skills, and should be developed in-house over the longer-term.
Summary
We labour under the constraint that many of our most important users and stakeholders have not yet been born - the future generations that we are keeping our history for - the unknown and unknowable future. We hope that these descendants will offer a 'thank-you' to us for doing our job of preserving history so that they may benefit, and may better understand who we are and may though our curation also know the ancestors from whom we have carefully collected, selected and preserved records and artifacts. But the future generations are only one, and perhaps lofty, concern given that we live in the present and that our current generation of users need us now, not in the future, and we have an overriding responsibility to service the needs of our generation, while never forgetting the wide time spectrum of which we are merely a point in time in the present.
We are torn between our need to service the need of the present users for access to information and the need to service our future unknown stakeholders for their unknown needs and digitization is at the core of both of these, perhaps conflicting, requirements.
A digitization strategy is a statement for how the institution positions itself into the world of digitization and what it is planning to do about this. This strategy is a core document, intended to provide focus and direction in meeting a vision, a heading towards a distance goal, and the means of measuring progress towards this goal.
All of the above elements of a digitization strategy can be framed in terms of decisions on how to approach the digitization processes and where in a spectrum to position the institution. Two example of this spectrum are whether to digitize the entire collection or to select or cherry-pick only the best items, and secondly whether to do the entire project in-house or to outsource this in its entirety. These are among the choices that the management of the institution must identify and make, and it is this which makes the process of creating a digitization strategy far from trivial.
We are now extending our work to develop a process to lead up to the digitisation strategy, since it is clear that this is not a simple or trivial task.
I will be happy to deal with any comments on the issues of digitization strategies and would be very interested in knowing where institutions are in this process and how close existing strategies are to the standards recommended.
Roger is an IT consultant specializing in the digital heritage. Contact Roger on roger@rl.co.za or make a comment on this post and he will forward it to him.