Standards for digital preservation

Question

What are the basic preparations for an archival institution thats thinking of digitising its paper holdings. Is there any standards and manuals to serve as guidelines for the project and where can one find them.

Comments

Your question appears to be about standards for digitisation rather than digital preservation (see http://qanda.digipres.org/5/is-digitisation-on-topic for context on this distinction). Would you mind editing the title to reflect that?

Answer 1

Good place to start: Standards for newspaper digitization/digital preservation: http://metaarchive.org/public/publishing/Guidelines_for_Digital_Newspaper_Preservation_Readiness.pdf

Answer 2

The digitisation standards of The National Archives (UK) are set out in http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/digitisation-at-the-national-archives.pdf These are tailored to our own requirements and may not be suitable for other institutions (in particular due to the scale of our expected digitisation programme we have opted to store master images as JP2 due to the resulting storage savings, for others the additional technical complexity of that format may lead to a different decision).

Answer 3

Take a look at the Federal Agencies Digitization Initiative:

http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/

It is a collaborative effort by US federal agencies to define common guidelines, methods, and practices for digitizing historical content.

It offers guidelines on a variety of different formats.