Digital Preservation Q&A - Recent questions tagged digitisation

Best practices for digitising tapes captured at a low resolution

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 23:20:50 +0000

What would be best practice for digitising VHS and miniDV tapes where the camera was set to capture at a low resolution? Our usual practice for video digitistation to date has been to capture in uncompressed AVI format, which results in very large files. However, am wondering whether it is worth all the space required, given the quality of the digitised files will be relatively poor anyway. I do understand that using a compressed format to save space may result in even poorer quality files. Thoughts?

Is there any best practice/guidance on where to store, in METS, metadata about digitisation/digital creation processes?

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 11:38:34 +0000

For digitised files, what is the best way to capture metadata about the digitisation process (equipment/software, settings, dates, operator names, etc) in METS? Should it be captured?

I'm not just thinking of image based digitisation, so a couple of example scenarios would be:

Digitising a newspaper to a TIFF or JP2?
"Digitising" sound content from carrier form to a WAVE file?

My thoughts were around using the <techMD> or <digiprovMD> elements, however neither seem to completely fit.

The LoC’s METS primer suggests "<techMD> records technical metadata about a component of the METS object, such as a digital content file” (http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/METSPrimerRevised.pdf#page=41). So this appears to be aimed at the technical characteristics of the files being preserved.

Just below that, in the same document (http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/METSPrimerRevised.pdf#page=43), is says the "<digiprovMD> can be used to record preservation-related actions taken on the various files which comprise a digital object (e.g., those subsequent to the initial digitization of the files such as transformation or migrations) or, in the case of born digital materials, the files' creation”. So for digitised material, this seems to be about actions *after* digitisation, not the digitisation itself. On the contrary, for born-digital content the wording implies it can be used to capture details of content creation.

Perhaps I've missed something obvious (or used the wrong search terms), but I'm not finding much in the way of digitisation provenance capture.

Does anyone else record such info in METS, and if so, how so?

DIY digitisation, good or bad?

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:59:04 +0000

Our digitisation workflow is a long and complex one that takes well over a year from the time we start gathering another batch to digitise, to the time we finally make the digitised items publicly available.

Because it takes so long, we often gets requests to bypass our existing procedures by scanning or photographing works using standard desktop scanners or cameras. What do others think of this? As long as we comply with our digitisation standards and properly check the quality of the results, would it be acceptable to bypass our established digitisation procedures?

So far we have only done this for items we don't intend to preserve long term, but we are facing increasing pressure to also do it for more valuable special collections items