Creating Digital Collections: A Practical Guide

Citation

Barker, P. (2011), "Creating Digital Collections: A Practical Guide", The Electronic Library, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 154-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471111111550

Computers are playing an increasingly important role in people's lives. As this happens, the significance of “digital collections” is also becoming more apparent – both from a personal and an organisational perspective. Essentially, such a collection usually contains one or more different types of digital object. These objects may be “born digital” (for example, an image from a digital camera) or they may be derived from existing non‐digital material (as is the case when a printed page of text is digitised using an electronic scanning device). Primarily, this book is devoted to this second type of object collection. It is therefore devoted to digital collections produced by some form of scanning process.

The material in the book is organised into thirteen basic chapters, a collection of appendices, and a bibliography. Throughout the book the authors use a case study to illustrate various points and issues that they want to make. This case study is based on the digitisation work that has been undertaken by the authors within the Digital Collections Production Center at the Washington Research Library Consortium in the USA.

The introductory chapter of the book is used to set the scene for the material that follows in subsequent parts of the publication. Chapter 2 then goes on to discuss various issues relating to the planning and management of digitisation projects. As is discussed and debated in chapter 3, the selection of appropriate material for digitisation is an important consideration from both a technical and a financial point of view; the potential utility of the resulting digital products also has to be considered. Because of its importance in relation to describing and organising a digital collection, the topic of metadata is introduced and discussed in chapter 4. This chapter provides a useful ‘overview’ treatment of metadata topics in anticipation of its use within digitisation projects – as is discussed later in the book (chapter 6).

In chapter 5 the authors provide a useful description and discussion of the technologies and techniques that are employed when digitising material. Their treatment only considers the scanning of two‐dimensional artefacts and no mention is made of three‐dimensional scanning. As mentioned previously, chapter 6 (“Creating Metadata”) is used to extend the discussion of metadata that was previously undertaken in chapter 4. This later chapter goes into some of the more practical and pragmatic aspects of metadata creation to support a digital collection. Naturally, because people will use the products of a digitisation project, the characteristics of the end‐user interface to an online collection is a very important consideration that has to be made when delivering its content to its end‐user population. This topic is addressed in chapter 7.

Having discussed each of the major processes involved in a typical digitisation project in the previous chapters of the book, chapter 8 serves as an overview chapter. This summarises and integrates the various steps involved and discusses the relationships between them. This chapter also provides a discussion of various topics related to workflow management. Some of the other useful topics that are addressed in this second‐half of the book include the use of a digital collections management system (DCMS) (chapter 9), selecting appropriate hardware and software for a DCMS (chapter 10 and Appendix 1) and a discussion of the importance of documentation in relation to achieving a successful outcome for a digitisation project (chapter 11 and Appendix 2). Of course, the success of a digitisation project also depends upon building a team of people that have the relevant skills and knowledge to undertake a venture of this sort; this important topic is discussed in chapter 12. The final chapter of the book provides a short conclusion in which the authors summarise future developments in this area in terms of three types of process: integration, automation and collaboration. They briefly mention the concept of “mass digitisation” of material – as laudable as this may be – but do not consider the impact that this might have on potential users.

Overall, I found this book a very interesting one; it is comprehensive in its treatment, well organised, and quite well written. The book brings together a very useful collection of material that will undoubtedly be a valuable source of information for those who are about to become involved in a digitisation project or who are considering undertaking such a venture. The book's content will also be a valuable asset for students and academics who are interested in this important area of library and information science.