Friday, August 9

Do It Right Or Do It Twice - "Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations" should save time

The Board of Directors of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) endorsed “Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations” at the 2013 American Library Association.annual conference. 

The Recommendations were created to help libraries that are digitizing content to avoid having to digitize the same content again. "Institutions can feel secure that if an item has been digitized at, or above, these specifications, they can depend on it to continue to be viable in the future"

How can a library standard be relevant to Student Multimedia Design Center users?  By following these guidelines, one can avoid having to re-digitized materials.  For example, most of the Center's scanners default to 300 dpi, which captures text nicely, but 300 dpi is too grainy to show fine details in artwork or photos that are to be published.  An image good enough for a small screen may not be acceptable for use in a poster, article, or book.  This will be explained further in the October 14, 2013 Digitizing Old Formats: Photos and Videos workshop.

While larger file sizes require more storage space and bandwidth, files can sampled and reduced in size for use as web graphics.  For the long haul, creating and saving appropriately high resolution digital files produces files that won't need to be recreated if the image is needed again later in a higher resolution version. 

The Recommendations include File Naming Conventions for Digital Collections to help assign meaningful file names.  This may be eye-opening for people who let their scanners and cameras name their image files and never change them.

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