Digital Assets Discussion Group: Digital Imaging Guidelines

Digital Imaging Introduction
Project Planning Considerations and Guidelines
Digital Imaging Project Cycle
Technological
Intellectual Management
The Physical Artifact(s)

Intellectual Management

Perhaps most crucial in a digital imaging project is the need to develop a system for managing digital files produced throughout the project. Being able to quickly and easily determine a digital file’s corresponding physical source simply from the file’s name is extremely useful in a digital imaging project. Managing digital files can become extremely difficult if there is no logical system to the file names. Developing a naming system or file-naming convention for a project is helpful and should be developed during the preparation for digitization step in the project’s cycle. A system for naming the files depends heavily on the collection being digitized. If it is a book it might be possible to name each file by a short text string identifying the title of the book followed by the number of the page the image represents. In some cases this can be more difficult. A collection of archival manuscripts may not have an item-level classification or inventory. In this case it would be necessary to impose an inventory numbering system to map the digital surrogates to the physical artifacts. Assistance with this task is available through Digital Collections Services. These and other concerns are also important when considering : the storage, use, and access of the digital files.

Additional issues that will be covered here include:

• How will the digital files produced in the project be managed?
• How will be intellectual property rights be handled?