How to start a digital project

Faculty

• Faculty who have an idea for digitizing content as a library collection should contact the subject specialist for their disciplinary area.
• Faculty who need assistance with digitization associated with courses, personal or departmental research should contact their designated Academic Technology Specialist, or visit the Academic Technology Lab.

Selectors and Librarians

Fill out Pre-proposal

In order to receive support from the Digital Library Program on your digital project, please provide a brief description using this project pre-proposal form. Pre-proposals are reviewed by the Digital Collections Working Group for conceptual approval and to provide advice on next steps and mechanisms for providing access to users.

Develop work plan

Project managers should seek consultation on preservation, metadata and intellectual property/copyright issues before initiating digitization work. Project managers should also develop a detailed work plan, along with a project budget. SUL/AIR has a number of digitization labs available to support digital projects. In some cases, projects may require use of an outside vendor to perform digitization service. This may involve development of a Request for Proposal (RFP).

Digitize Collection

Whether conducted in-house or outsourced to a vendor, most digital projects involve several steps. These include (1) selection or content to be digitized, (2) digitization of archival masters for preservation, (3) quality control, (4) creation of derivatives for online access, (5) capture of descriptive, administrative and technical metadata. In many cases, standards exist to ensure long-term preservation and make provision of access easier.

Ingest and store in repository

SUL/AIR is developing a "trusted digital repository" to store digital collections and associated metadata for long-term preservation. The digital repository will also provide tools so users can access online collections. SUL/AIR is developing tools to automate ingestion of your digital collections into the repository. During the development stages, project managers will work with the Repository Manager to ensure that their collection is properly stored.

Provide access to users via the SUL web

Once your collection is digitized there are a variety of ways in which the content can be made available to end-users from within and outside the Stanford community. If a record exists in SUL's online catalog, the digital files can be linked directly to that record, so when a patron conducts a search in Socrates, they will find the digital files. Collections can be made available for browsing via collection web pages, which can be designed in house, or in consultation with a web design firm. SUL/AIR currently supports enhanced access to still images, using Luna Insight and structured texts (such as SGML and XML), using tools developed by the Humanities Digital Information Service. External services, such as ebrary, can assist in offering full-text searchable access to PDF files.