Contents:
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Difficult media: which and why?
- 3. Preservation Background
- 4. Recommendations
- 5. Improvement Tracks
- 6. Pitfalls
- 7. Conclusions
- 8. Glossary.
This report describes best practice solutions when digitizing large amounts of ‘difficult media’: film rolls, open reel video and audio tapes, and 78 rpm audio disks. It begins by explaining what it considers ‘difficult’ about these media and then goes on to present best practices for the digitization workflow, including the information to be recorded about the media in a collection database. It emphasizes the ‘triage’ approach, the technical mapping of the collection, in order to separate the most difficult media from the easier, in order to increase efficiency and keep costs down.
This report, written within PrestoSpace ‘factory approach’ context, is a useful resource for archives planning digitization projects. It offers concrete advice, provides good input on workflow approaches and brings up important issues staff need to be aware of that can impact project resources and costs. Its suggestions on attributes to be recorded in a collection database could be used as input on technical metadata, a term which at the time of the report’s writing (2006) was not prevalent. The section on “Improvement Tracks” which refers to tools under research within the project is less useful for the actual digitization process.