Cutting Corners in Digitization

I came upon this presentation and paper (http://www.midwestarchives.org/2006_Fall/presentations/Ranger%20Omahapresentationranger.doc) recently about the process of digitizing collections. It was given at the fall 2006 Midwest Archives Conference. The "More Product, Less Process" paper by Greene and Meissner was the conference inspiration.

Happy New Year!
Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig

Funding Opp

An implementation grant opportunity announced by NEH with a award ceiling of $500K. It's from the NEH so this would be what Karen Avery at the Funding track called a partnering possibility. - Ricc

Grant Announcement - Brief Description
These grants support interpretive museum exhibitions (both long-term and traveling) and the interpretation of historic sites and houses, and include support for accompanying publications, Web sites, and public humanities programming. Public humanities programs support lifelong learning in history, literature, comparative religion, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities for broad public audiences.
Link to Full Announcement

Follow-up on digital data

I agree with Ricc's discourse on digitized and digital data. Data can be born digital, and that is certain the case for a lot of scientific data. These digital objects must be preserved and curated. The NASA community has been well aware of this for space data, and NASA data centers have been doing just this for the past few decades. It may be useful to SI to look into some of these digital data management activities (visit SAO!). I personally would like to compare notes with other units that manage digital data for science analysis purposes. Maybe we should organize some fact-finding/awareness-raising field trips.

Digitization is never perfect

Perhaps this was covered in the 'capturing' track, but I didn't see it in their presentation:

Is it 100% clear to everyone that NO digitization captures everything, even of a 2-dimensional object like a drawing or photograph? Color representations are always approximate and will depend on lighting choices and conditions; cameras introduce artifacts into the captured images; pixelization is always at a coarser scale than the original objects contain. For 3-dimensional objects the problem is, obviously, far more acute.

As there will always be newer and better ways to digitize coming along (see e.g. the Economist Technology Review 12/2/2006, p.6), SI should anticipate a ongoing need to re-digitize the collections. This leads to a need to view the quality of digitization required not as one value, but as a range of values for different uses. (Getting back to the 'using' track.)

For searching archives a low resolution image may be enough, and may be cheap and quick to create for an entire collection. Instead, to do in depth research on an image, or to make a calendar picture, will require far more; the contents of an image may be encoded - either by inspection, or soon by software - and provide a higher level of digitized information about the collections.

As soon as the digital archive includes more than one image of the same object a way of cross-linking them is needed, not just to identify that they are indeed of the same image, but to pinpoint locations within each image as being of the same section of the original; this implies a scale and a coordinate system. For 3-dimensional objects co-ordinate systems are even more important.

Having multiple images of differing quality leads to the ideas, which we use widely in astronomy projects, of 'versions' of data sets and of 'levels' of processing, with each level doing more to the data.

Guidelines for Curation Metadata

At the Curation Workshop I heard the question "Well, when we created our digital collection, we just kept the filenames, but we realize now that that's not enough; what should we have kept as metadata?"

So, I jotted down how I would approach that question, starting from the roles that are played by the metadata. Here is a link to these Guidelines for Designing Metadata (PDF format). I thought it might be helpful to curators.

Standards of Authenticity

Authenticity of digital objects affects us all regardless of whether we curate, preserve, access, or create them. As an authoritative body, our integrity is on the line. In a world where digital objects are moved from one physical storage media to another because the first media has reached the end of its lifespan, and where an object must be migrated from its original data format to one or more other formats because the original format is no longer accessible, what are the principles that guide our choices and by which the quality of our objects can be measured?

For example, a digital image captured in a Sony Mavica (proprietary) data format on flash memory is migrated to a TIFF data format on a gold-based CD. What will be our rationale for asserting the authenticity of the image once it is a TIFF and on a CD?

So I ask the question: by what standards do we determine a digital object's authenticity?

Digitized or digital - necessary distinction?

One of my areas of particular interest is in digital objects of record. In my experience, people's first and some times only thoughts of digital records are of working files - things used to create analog items - rather than being the original object. As an archivist, this drives me nuts. I am eager to change this perception wherever I find it.

When you look up definitions of 'digitize,' consistently the gist of what comes back is to create a digital rendition of a non-digital object. What, then, of objects which are born and live in the digital realm.

As custodians and users of cultural heritage objects, scientific data, and official records, I am convinced that our concept of digital material needs to be expanded to encompass this segment of the digital world. I believe this is a necessary distinction that will help increase people's desire these objects of record with the same care and attention as we give to non-digital material.