Investing in Archival Digital Projects
Archival digital projects offer greater efficiency, opportunity costs, increased institutional prestige, build staff expertise, and improve morale.
Strategizing for Digitization Projects
Archivists strategize before a digitization project. Digitization requires a significant investment, and assessing costs and benefits is essential.
Reading Room Recommendations
An archives reading room should provide reader comfort with optimum security for historical materials.
Processing Room Recommendations
A processing room provides a separate workspace from storage areas where archivists examine, sort, arrange, describe, and rehouse archival materials.
Archival Storage Room Recommendations
Archival storage should incorporate only the materials required to house and store the collections. Detailed recommendations and best practices.
Metadata Creation for Digitized Collections
Metadata provides users with a standardized means of intellectual access to digitized materials.
Descriptive Practices
Digitizing archival materials requires describing them to aid users in discovering them. Description is challenging due to detail required.
Description of Archival Collections
Description of archival collections assumes archivists should increase the number of access points to materials to help users navigate their collections
Quality Control and Post-Production in Digitization Projects
As part of a digitization project, some post-production is necessary to obtain surrogates that match the original’s detail, sharpness, and tonal range
Digitization Labor Options
Archives and archivists should consider both in-house and outsourced labor options for digitization projects; guidance on weighing the options.
Digitization Planning and Cost Projection
Organizations rely on best practices to justify the investments made in digitization projects; strategic planning, management, realistic cost estimates
Selection Criteria for Digitization
Aesthetic, evidential, informational, intrinsic, and artifactual values, influence selection for archival digitization.
Issues to Consider Before Digitization
Prior to archival digitization, archivists should address areas of concern: publicity, privacy, copyright, legal matters, including international laws
Appraisal for Digitization
Selection is an indispensable tool for digitization because maintaining collections is expensive, and expenses for digital materials are significant.
Creating Sustainable Digital Files; What Archivists Need to Know
Technical post, digital archives. Converting physical information to electronic form requires archivists to understand digitization fundamentals
Dynamic Range and Resolution for Digitization Projects
Technical post; archival digitization; additive and subtractive light mixtures differ; this complicates reproduction of images on monitors or in print.
Digitization Basics for Archivists
Archivists embrace the digital world as they transform their physical holdings into electronic records through digitization projects.
Ready to Read: The Digital Decisive Moment—Transformative Digitization Practices
Archivists have entered the digital decisive moment; digitized and born-digital images have substantially departed from the legacy of analog materials.
The Business Case for Archival Digitization
Archivists can accelerate gains from digitization by presenting a business case for digital transformation to those who lead their organizations.
Digitization in a Post-Pandemic World
Increases in remote working, changing needs, and user preferences for remote research have made digitization of archival holdings a priority.
The Benefits of Digitization
Archival digitization projects are complex but when managed successfully their benefits outweigh the skills, costs, and time required
The Purpose of Corporate History
The history of a business is a key to its identity; keeping the memory of its strategic path via corporate history helps focus that identity over time.
Identifying Records for Retention
Organizations evaluate records and set retention periods based on records lifecycles; there are 3 stages: active use, semi-active use, and disposition
Record Filing Methods and Maintenance
The functions of records maintenance include organizing and filing records and identifying which records to retain and for how long.
Conducting a Records Survey
The purpose of a records survey is to determine records categories users create, receive, process, or maintain in operational or project-based work.