Amplifying Hidden Voices
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Just as each collection is unique, your digitization and preservation plans should reflect the strengths and values of your organization. In this session, we’ll discuss how to be sure you are designing a project that can be achieved within the structure of the Digitizing Hidden Collections program for the CLIR and sustained into the future. We’ll offer guidance on the technical specifications reviewers look for in the most competitive applications and explain some industry-standards concerning long-term digital preservation and sustainability.
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Amplifying Hidden Voices
- 2. ￮ Click ‘CC Live Transcript ’ to turn on captions ￮ All attendees are muted ￮ Default chat to “Everyone” ￮ Submit questions in chat ￮ Recording in progress Our Webinar Platform 2
- 3. 3 Ais Cahuilla Lǝnape Haki-nk (Lenni-Lenape) Nacotchtank (Anacostan) 𐓏𐓏𐓏𐓏𐓏𐓏 𐓏𐓏𐓏𐓏 𐓏𐓏𐓏𐓏 𐓏𐓏^𐓏𐓏^ (Osage) Payómkawichum (Luiseño) Piscataway Seminole Serrano Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee) Taino Timucua Tongva Visit Native-Land.ca to learn about Indigenous lands where you live. Land Acknowledgement
- 4. 4 Polls ● Do you represent an organization with previous experience in digitization projects? ● What aspects of planning and project management would you like us to focus on?
- 5. Project Details--Work Plan A detailed work plan of all major project activities, staffing support, and anticipated deliverable deadlines that includes: ● Schedule ● Activities ● People, partners, and collaborators ● Technology Brief statements on Risk mitigation, the team’s Assessment plan, and the long-term Sustainability of project deliverables. 5 Related Application Components
- 6. Project Details--Capacity What capacity and strengths will you bring to this project, and what capacity and strengths do you hope to build? 6 Related Application Components
- 7. Subcontracts Provide estimates, quotes, or subcontracts that support amounts listed in the budget documents for any work to be done by service providers or independent contractors associated with this project where the cost will be greater than US$5000. 7 Related Application Components
- 8. Project Details--Outcomes Describe the outcomes of your envisioned project and who would benefit from its success. This response should: ● Provide a general overview of the planned digital outputs, online access platforms, and long-term digital sustainability plan 8 Related Application Components
- 9. Administrative notes ● Poll: How prepared do you feel to develop the application components we’ll discuss? ● Post-session survey: Open now, submit later! 9
- 10. Welcome! Allana Mayer Archivist, librarian, writer contact@allanaaa.com 10 Jess Posgate Projects Coordinator OurDigitalWorld jposgate@ourdigitalworld.org
- 12. Session Outline ￮ The Basics ￮ Organizational Capacity ￮ Collections & Conversion ￮ Community ￮ Measuring & Evaluation ￮ Environment ￮ Q&A 12
- 13. The basics 13
- 14. Project “one and done” ● finite: start and end date ● specific collection or types of items ● independent activity ● one time grant/funding 14
- 15. Program “big picture” ● long-term planning ● collaborative ● iterative development of ○ workflows ○ standards ○ tools ○ documentation 15
- 16. “ A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than you expected; a carefully planned project will only take twice as long ~U of California Observatories 16
- 18. A sustainable reputation Grant-funded projects start you at a disadvantage Commit to long-term operating costs (even if it’s 0.01FTE) Schedule quarterly, yearly, five-year-interval maintenance now 18 Invest in your staff, especially students and the future workers of the profession, and in your future supporters Lead by example in kindness, accommodation, & equity “Include any reasons that the activities described in the proposal cannot be supported by the organization and/or its partners themselves.”
- 19. Realistic planning Can an organization of your size sustain an independent online collection? What would happen if you went bankrupt in ten years? Do you have a succession plan for your physical & digital collections? 19 Do you need a partner to commit to long-term maintenance and infrastructure? (Updating platforms, security checks, restoring quickly)
- 20. Achievable staffing Pay everyone the equivalent of at least $60,000 a year ($33 an hour) Include training, onboarding, & mistake-making in your timelines Add 50% to all of your time and resource estimates 20 Accept, plan for, & support attrition in your project staff Mentor your precarious staff Support your project staff in finding permanent or further employment Always provide glowing references
- 22. Assessing Content Primary Materials Loose pages Printed photos Standard file box Open shelving 35mm microfilm microfiche Quantities 150-175 pages / inch 100-120 photos / inch 200-2500 pages / box 1500 pages / foot 1000 images / reel <600 images / fiche 22 https://ourdigitalworld2015.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/paper_image_estimation_000.pdf https://bmiimaging.com/blog/microfilm/how-much-microfilm-and-microfiche-do-i-have/
- 23. Pro: Good for fragile or specialty materials Keeps material on site Builds new skills Saves money? Maybe In-house digitization Con: Requires expertise, space, specialty tools Slower production Less sophisticated hardware/software One-time staff leave with their expertise 23
- 24. 24
- 25. Pro: Specialized staff & equipment process lots of awkward material, fast! Custom, uniform output Lets staff focus on description & subject context Outsourcing digitization Con: Material leaves repository Less capacity building at host organization Unsupervised quality control 25
- 26. Vendor negotiations Be Specific What exactly are you having digitized If possible, have an onsite visit from the vendor before getting a quote Be clear about your output requirements and timelines Tech specs Always ask for a high quality master file (e.g. TIFF, WAV, etc) Be sure output formats meet requirements of your delivery system (file size, full text search, transcription, translation requirements, etc) Special handling & Reputation Work with fragile materials Shipping or pick up/delivery Insurance and indemnification clauses Ask for references, or find community reviews or experience 26
- 27. Community 27
- 28. Ethics of care Duty to consult (and its many caveats) Weigh the communities’ priorities Patience, patience, patience Humility Pay people for their expertise Hire people for their expertise 28 To whom do you owe access? To whom do you owe privacy? Do your materials represent children or those incapable of consent?
- 30. rightsstatements.org https://rightsstatement s.org/page/1.0/?langua ge=en 30 https://rightsstatement s.org/page/1.0/?langua ge=fr National Heritage Digitization Strategy Report: RightsStatements.org in the Canadian context https://cnhds.files.wordpress.co m/2020/07/nhds- rightsstatements-report- 2020.pdf
- 32. When the project is over Your online platform Is your server commercial or institutional? Who is maintaining it? Did you sign a contract? For how many years? Did you pay in dvance? 32 Is the technology sustainable and supported? endings.uvic.ca/index.html Do you have private items? In the same platform? When will private items be opened up? By whom?
- 33. When the project is over Your project files All in one place Multiple people have account passwords or are administrators No “single point of failure” in your organization (human or technological) 33 LOCKSS: Ensure your system does backups & add your own backups (two hard drives, each in different locations) Use standard file-naming (at least for the folders) so future staff can navigate them If communities or users ask questions, make sure you can retrace your steps to answer them
- 34. When the project is over User communication Will you allow user uploads? Comments? Who is responsible for moderating submissions & feedback? Are they getting notifications? Do you have a takedown procedure? Do you have an editing procedure? 34 Community/Contributor communication Will you have more events? Will you be available to collaborate when they want to? Can they control the platform? Contribute to it?
- 36. During the project Why? Motivation Gather hard facts & figures Learn & Improve 36 How? Timelines & schedule Meetings & reports Documentation
- 37. When the project is over Assessment Who is using it? How often? Are you tracking web traffic? Europeana Impact Playbook pro.europeana.eu/page/impact 37
- 38. Some impact & use examples from our survey 38 Allana Mayer, OurDigitalWorld: Digitization in Ontario Public Libraries ourdigitalworld2015.files.wordpress .com/2020/07/odw- digitizationreport-2019jan- fresh.pdf
- 39. Contribute to the field Release code, software, & metadata Contribute to hubs (DPLA, etc.) Use & contribute to open- source software (Omeka, Islandora, AtoM, Archivematica, ArchivesSpace, CollectiveAccess...) Publish best practices, standards, case studies Support staff publishing & speaking 39 Leading by example: Support project staff Pay well Mentor Consult communities with humility Compensate experts
- 40. Environment 40
- 41. Long-term planning What does it cost to keep machines, servers, and digital platforms running and online, and what do you do with them when the project is over? Where will you store them? 41 Ask to buy secondhand equipment from others’ projects. Use listservs & professional org directories. Share equipment through your regional organizations; plan to donate your equipment once used. Use vendors/partnerships where transport costs will be less than equipment purchase costs.
- 42. Long-term planning (i.e. Disaster planning) Keith L. Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tessa Walsh, and Laura Alagna: Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ handle/1/40741399/360-9081- 82.1.165.pdf?sequence=1&isAllo wed=y 42 ProjectARCC (Archives Responding to Climate Change) projectarcc.org Resources at projectarcc.org/climat e-change-syllabus/ Amanda Oliver: The impact of climate change on Canadian archives www.emerald.com/insight/cont ent/doi/10.1108/RMJ-10-2020- 0035/full/html
- 43. Long-term planning (i.e. Disaster planning) Amanda Oliver: The impact of climate change on Canadian archives www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108 /RMJ-10-2020-0035/full/html 43 “I would encourage all Canadian archives to start considering the sustainability of their operations. If you’re spending large amounts of money on heating and cooling your space, you need to anticipate that those costs will begin rising exponentially and be ever less reliable, to the point where they are impossible to resource. That is an existential threat for physical collections, especially in a place subject to seasonal temperature and humidity variations as extreme as we experience in Canada.” “I think we (as a profession and at my institution) need to seriously re-examine the way we think about acquiring and preserving born-digital archival material. Current solutions are extremely carbon-intensive and resource- intensive at a time when archives desperately need to be planning with clear eyes for a hostile future.” “We also need to have a serious and unpleasant conversation about digital preservation.” This re-examination of digital records should extend beyond archival practices to all recordkeeping activities such as retention scheduling, records appraisal and final disposition decisions. The carbon impact of acquiring digital records and the implications of that on digital preservation best practices need to be studied further.
- 44. The cost of digital infrastructure Bethany Scott, University of Houston Libraries: Estimating Energy Use for Digital Preservation saaers.wordpress.com /2020/10/06/estimatin g-energy-use-for- digital-preservation- part-i/ 44
- 45. Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock: The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation www.digitalbedrock.co m/resources-2 45 The cost of digitization
- 46. Question + Answer 46 Submit questions using chat
- 47. 47 Allowable Costs ● Salaries/wages and applicable fringe benefits for staff members ● Staff training and/or consultant fees related to the project, including advisors from communities connected to or affected by the digitization of the collections. ● Administrative support for personnel who are not directly affiliated with the project but contribute to its overall coordination or implementation (Collaborative projects only; Maximum: $10,000) ● Equipment, supplies and materials (Maximum: $10,000) ● Other services related to project objectives. Services might include, but are not limited to, digitization service providers, equipment rental, server time, and backup charges. ● Funds for travel that is essential to carry out the proposed project ● Conference registration and related travel expenses Maximum: $7,500
- 48. 48 Disallowed Costs ● Indirect costs (see CLIR’s Indirect Cost Policy); ● Indirect costs listed as direct costs, such as network charges, telephone, photocopying, etc. ● General-purpose items that may reasonably be expected to have a useful life after the project, such as office furniture, shelving, or archival cabinets; ● Conservation or preservation treatment services for source collections beyond the stabilization of materials in preparation for digitization; such costs should be assumed by the applicant and/or collaborating institutions; ● Activity related to the conversion or migration of born-digital files; ● Tuition remission for student employees.
Editor's Notes
- Delete prior to use [CLIR staff will share a brief introductory script and up to five slides with attendees in Zoom]
- Chat: https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicant-resources [JOY] Just a couple reminders about using Zoom during this session: A live transcript is being generated if you’d like to utilize it. To turn on this feature, click the “CC Live Transcript” button at the bottom of your Zoom window. You may notice that this is a regular Zoom meeting space instead of the webinar space. You have control of your own microphones and video, so please be mindful and ensure you’re muted if you aren’t speaking. We know sitting on camera in a Zoom meeting can be exhausting, so feel free to turn that off during the presentation. At times, you may be invited to unmute or pop on video for discussion or Q&A. You are also welcome to use chat for conversation throughout. To open the chat box, you can hover your mouse toward the bottom of the screen and open it manually. The chat defaults to send a message to “everyone,” but you may also message individuals directly. This session is being recorded. The slides, Q&A, recording, and transcript will be made available on the “Apply for an Award” page of our website by the end of the week. If you’ve missed any of the sessions in our series, they’re all available in the same place.
- CHAT: https://native-land.ca/ [BECCA] Our team would like to acknowledge that, as residents of the United States, we are speaking to you from unceded land of many Indigenous peoples. Those of us working at CLIR are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on their homelands, and ask you to join us in acknowledging all Indigenous communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. As we share a few slides and introduce our guest speakers, we invite you to introduce yourself in the chat too, and to share land acknowledgements for the area where you live or work, if you’d like. May our shared acknowledgement and the program we’re speaking about today demonstrate CLIR’s commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. _____________ Suggested text from http://landacknowledgements.org/: We are gathered on the unceded land of the ( ) peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the ( ) community, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. (Name of institution) also acknowledges that it was founded upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples, including those on whose land this institution is located. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. https://native-land.ca/ Alexandria, VA - Piscataway Washington, DC - Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Piscataway Philadelphia, PA - Lǝnape Haki-nk (Lenni-Lenape) Pittsburgh, PA - Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 𐒼𐓂𐓊𐒻 𐓆𐒻𐒿𐒷 𐓀𐒰^𐓓𐒰^ (Osage) Gainesville, FL - Timucua, Seminole Stuart, FL - Ais, Taino, Seminole Riverside, CA - Cahuilla, Serrano, Payómkawichum (Luiseño), Tongva
- As we get started today, we’re going to ask you to complete two quick polls that will help today’s cohosts gauge what, among the many aspects of designing a plan for digitization, you’re most interested in hearing about. So the first question: Do you represent an organization with previous experience in digitization? And we’ll share the results— And second: What aspects of planning and project management would you most like to focus on today? And we’ll share the results of that one too.
- Thanks for your responses. Before we hand things over to our hosts for the session, we wanted to share the parts of the application where you’ll be asked to provide details of your digitization plan, so you can keep them in mind and map the conversation to your Hidden Collections proposal. In all things, we want to bring focus back to the what is both ‘achievable’ and sustainable’ for your organization. One central component is the Work Plan: an document you’ll craft that will expand on your initial timeline to include all activities related to the project. For the final application, it’s important to include very specific details about any collection description and preparatory work, the digitization process itself, where your files will go, and the process for ensuring their sustainability and accessibility.
- In the Capacity section, you’ll be asked speak to the capacities and strengths of those involved in the project work. While this section is very broad, at least some of this response should relate to your capacity to undertake the digitization plan you’ve crafted, and how these will be expanded through the project. You should also address your capacity to maintain the project’s deliverables in the long term.
- If you are considering the engagement of a vendor or subcontractor for work in excess of $5000, we also ask that you provide quotes from the individuals, organizations, or companies you’re working with. This session will touch on some things to think about as you consider making a vendor part of your digitization plan.
- And finally is the section that asks you to address project outcomes. In this section, you’re asked to describe, among other things, the planned digital outputs, online access platforms, and your long-term digital sustainability plan.
- CHAT: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DHC09302021 SHARON: So—as we always do at these sessions: we’re going to share a quick poll to gauge how you’re feeling about today’s topic of designing an achievable, sustainable digitization plan. POLL: Beginning: How prepared do you feel to develop the application components we’ll discuss? [wait 60 seconds, share the poll results, then general verbal summary of the poll results] As a reminder, we are continuing to collect your feedback about this webinar series via post-session surveys. We’ll share the link to that in the chat now and encourage you to open that up so you don’t forget to submit it after the presentation. We’ll be back on at the end of this session to contribute during the Q&A portion. So with that, we’ll introduce today’s guests. [stop slide share] Allana Mayer is an archivist, librarian, and writer in Hamilton, Ontario. She is currently the Digital Archivist with the Canadian Friends Historical Association, and is also working on digitally preserving the research outputs of the Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Climate Change SSHRC-funded project. She has worked every part of a digitization project: planning, grant-writing, buying equipment, community consultation, hiring and training staff and volunteers, copyright, metadata, privacy, records management, archival appraisal, destruction, and many hours sitting at a scanner. Jess Posgate is the Projects Coordinator for OurDigitalWorld. Jess is a graduate of University of Victoria and University of Toronto with Masters degrees in English Literature and Information Studies. Jess has been involved in or managed large scale digitization projects since 2005 including the Robert Graves Diary Project and Agnes Macphail Digital Collection & Grey Highlands Digital Newspaper Collections, as well as shepherding dozens of newspaper and multimedia digitization projects for grassroots and large organizations in her role at OurDigitalWorld. Jess lives and works in an off grid house in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
- [CLIR STAFF hands off to host(s) so they can introduce themselves] Jess: Today is the Day of Truth & Reconciliation here in Canada, and I would like to acknowledge that I live on the territory of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Wendat, Anishnabewaki/Mississauga and most recently the Haudenosaunee Mohawk nation as a settler and guest today as a result of the Crawford Land Purchase and the Gunshot Treaty. As a non-Indigenous person, I am a visitor to this land and have a Treaty obligation to take care of this land, and I endeavour to continue to learn and live accordingly. Allana: I Live in Hamilton, Ontario, the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishnaabe, the Mississaugas of the New Credit, and prior to that the Neutrals as we know them, and many unknown communities and peoples for thousands of years before that. I note that we are meeting today on Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, and I hope we can do some thinking and discussion around that context, because I’ll be talking about sustainability in terms of your organizational capacity and long-term planning for the duty of care you have to the marginalized people represented in your records.
- [Include relevant timing/break times] We would be very happy to get into the nitty gritty technical details of your entire workplan, but we’re not going to present to you on too much detail at first. We’re going to run through some things you may not have thought about or may not be planning to explicate in your application or your project plan, just to make sure you exposed to some options and some resources, and then we’ll spend the majority of the time answering your questions in tandem with the grants team. So feel free to start filling up the Q&A now if you already have some technical questions specific to your situation. As you’ll see, some of these slides are for your reference later, and we won’t even really be talking about them in our run-through. But if you have questions about any particular topic we’re happy to scroll back to the particular slide and talk in more detail. We’re fully dependent on your questions, and no question is too small or too specific or too niche for us. There may be some moments where Jess is answering your question while I’m furiously googling to find you resources. So be sure to grab a copy of the chat, because it’ll have all sorts of useful links.
- We want to touch on some general rules of thumb for large scale digitization projects in this session. I expect some of the information we’re covering will be familiar to many of you and we realize it might be very high level in some cases, but we hope to set up the narrative and touch on as many aspects of planning and implementing a project as possible and that you will have questions for us afterward about any of these and anything else that occurs to you as we talk.
- Proposing a Digitization Project: •Funders want to advance their mission and to see long-term effects and impact even from short-term projects •Present your project initiative as part of a program, that this project will build your criteria to establish and advance a digitization program You can use one-time funding to set up policies, procedures, workflows, metadata and other standards and best practices as well as accomplishing one or more cycles of digital collection building for discovery
- •Long term thinking and planning starts with the project and becomes part of the program plan •engage and involve your community - provides opportunity for resource sharing, community investment, and builds stronger foundation on which the program can be sustained over time Consider that each project cycle within a program offers a chance to review and refine your approach whether to correct mistakes, create efficiencies or meet new technology requirements, and so on. •Digitization program (ideally) should become part of your annual budget and activities [Think about: •what standards will you be using, e.g. digital content and metadata standards •what tools you’ll use for digitization, what role will they have at your institution or organization, •what system(s) will you use for data management, discovery and display, are they sustainable if you consider internal staffing changes, technology, external requirements? •what documentation you will need to develop and revise e.g. policies re: personal information or copyright requests or documentation for data entry and workflows]
- Planning a digitization project requires a little humility: no matter how much you plan, chances are you won’t be able to account for everything. The trick is to try to think about every dark corner and shed some light on them in your planning process. When you’re thinking about goals, timelines, and deliverables BE SPECIFIC and BE REALISTIC Basically: Planning means knowing what you need done, how you need it done, and who will do it and how, by when, and don’t forget to anticipate the risk of something going wrong and how to work around those situations
- It’s useful to imagine what your organization might look like in ten years, twenty years, fifty years. Many of you can say you’ll still exist and these collections will still be online; others, not so likely. Heritage organizations tend to contract and disappear these days, not expand. Academic and federal institutions may be more likely to be swallowing up more of those small collections and become overtaxed themselves, so this is not just organizational but also an industry-wide capacity question. It’s important to be realistic.
- When I say grants put you at a disadvantage, I mean you’re already “annexing” these projects to an extraneous goal, instead of making them a core priority for your organization. It’s already nonessential. If you have an internal budget that can cover projects like these, you should use it. If you need to lobby for that internal budget, you should do it. Making important and culturally significant projects like these an “extra” or “stretch” goal tends to diminish their importance in the long run. If you’re a large enough organization that you can make this an institutional priority without relying on external grants, you should put those wheels in motion now. You need to think about maintenance tasks many years in the future while you plan this project now. A three-year grant means many years of some small portion of your time dedicated to keeping things running. Plan for it now while you’re applying, so you can have a plan for the issues that may arise. A one-time grant takes your focus away from other things, not just during the grant period but after. Your capacity as a project supervisor will be taken away from the other tasks already in your job description. You will be committing to hiring and training new staff on not just digitization tasks but organizational procedures. Your HR department will be involved with onboarding new staff. There is an administrative support amount in the CLIR grant, capped at $10,000 I think. The grant staff should be able to clarify that that is for things like personnel administration. If you commit to new staff, you need to recognize that they are taking on a precarious, time-limited contract. They will and should be looking for permanent work the entire time they are with you. You should be supporting them to do so, and you should be prepared for turnover if one of your project staff gets a better offer. You need to give glowing references, and you need to mentor those people if they need it.
- My $60,000 salary a year calculation is based on: You want a good skillset, so a current student in or graduate of a relevant diploma or degree is preferable There are no full ride scholarships so presume a student debt of $8000+ per year of education Being in school means both not working & paying an urban rent and costs of living, so assume life debts of $15,000+ per year of education Entry-level positions in academic libraries start at $60,000 a year, so you will be competitive, even though your project is contract-limited. Recognize that these grant-funded positions are most attractive to early-career professionals who are still precarious. Plan around those people continuing to look for full-time jobs. If you do the math and estimate that it takes, say, a full-time staff member a week to digitize 5 boxes, don’t set that as your quota or work your timelines around it. Add 50% extra time to all your estimates. Set your quota in this case at 3.33 boxes a week. That gives you time for, for example, statutory holidays, sick days, somebody tripping over a power cord and breaking your scanner for two weeks, or wiping two weeks’ worth of scans off a project hard drive. Or imagine you hire someone on a one-year contract and halfway through they tell you they found a permanent job. You’ll need to hire someone new, you’ll lose at least a month. It’s always better to be ahead of schedule than behind, and you know you can’t account for everything. So, rule of thumb, get your real estimates, then add 50% more time. If you do have precarious staff working for you, it’s your duty as a professional to mentor them, support them in their jobhunt, provide them with glowing references as they look for non-precarious work, celebrate them when they leave, and plan for that attrition so you’re not caught. It’s not appropriate for you to blame your staff when they find better opportunities - it is appropriate for you to plan for this in advance.
- Let’s talk nuts & bolts Here are some thoughts around the process for converting your physical collections into digital collections for long-term management and discovery
- You can use a calculators like the ones linked here to help ball-park the amount of image or page content in a certain storage format or to project content on microformats Prepare a very granular inventory of the material for this project and quanitify - as closely as possible - the content that will need handling and digitization so you can determine HOW it will be processed and, by extension, how to BUDGET for those activities. In-house vs outsourcing digitization will depend on your collection content and condition, your budget, your deadlines, any policies re: materials staying on site, etc.
- •what hardware do you need--depends on your original formats •any speciality tools like scanner pens for existing index records on paper? •you will need image manipulation software •OCR software for text extraction •Storage--hard drive? server? the larger the medium, the less handling has to occur depending on your infrastructure and team •logistically--space (accommodating scanner, people, other equipment), time and labour resources
- Realize that budgeting depends on your program approach It will change according to your situation including whether you are using dedicated staff or part-time reallocation Outsourcing/in-house digitization, etc. Equipment/software according to needs and existing resources In this scenario, of 10 regional digitization projects (2009-2011) with a budget of about $600k - none of which used outsourcing for their digitization - 92% of the budget was for staffing - from oversight & admin to project managers to digitization activities 4% Partner digitization equipment: suites of hardware and software for the partnerships 1% each was delegated to: Marketing & Promotion: conferences DF equipment: a mobile workstation, laptops, headsets, etc. Training: in-house training of DFs, including project management, standards & best practices, digitization and workflows, and toolkit training Travel: DF travel between locations in each partnership
- Again, choosing to outsource will depend on your resources - money, staff, expertise, etc - but also on your material quantities and type. The advantage of outsourcing can outweigh the benefit of scanning or digitizing materials in-house simply for the sake of efficiency but it doens’t have to be the only solution, outsourcing can be applied to a portion of the process as well.. For example, we usually send newspaper collections to digitization vendors for scanning because they can handle, systematically, a large amount of content in a shorter period of time - they’re tooled for that whether it’s paper copies or microformats. But then we will do the derivative file and OCRing in-house because of our platform specifications but also to ensure the quality of the OCR output which can vary depending on the vendor software. As well, some specialty vendor will only convert audio or video content and that leaves your team more time to do what they specialize in. Before deciding, though, I’ll talk a little about how to enter a vendor negotiation and some things to consider.
- Inventory Tech specs - for system and preservation Vendor reputation, responsibility and capacity will be a very important part of your relationship. Ask for references. You need to know what you need before you go in to these conversations: always ALWAYS get high res master files for preservation, but also know what you need for search and display and any specific indexing or file naming requirements you have for matching the digital files to the physical objects or formats being digitized. Work with your vendor. Build a conversation around the project so they are as invested as you are.
- As the excellent Anna Naruta-Moya said in the previous webinar in this series (September 14th: https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicant-resources/#webinars) “Do legal or ethical concerns mean you need to provide differential access?” and “If no legal or ethical restraints prohibit it, how will you provide and encourage open access and reuse?” She also covered RightsStatements and Traditional Knowledge labels, so I will reiterate how important they are. I’ll leave these slides in the presentation so you can access them later, but we’ll skim them for now.
- CLIR has great requirements about dedicating software and metadata to the public domain, not making spurious copyright claims to digitized materials: “must not claim additional rights or impose additional access fees or restrictions to the digital files created through the project, beyond those already required by law or existing agreements. Digital copies of originals that are already in the public domain must also be in the public domain.” RightsStatements are much more appropriate for all of you to be using in digitization projects than Creative Commons licenses. Frequently you will not own the copyright to your materials (unless your deed of gift was very specific on that and the donation was made from the copyright-holder originally). It’s more likely that you have orphaned materials - photographs and things with no clear copyright holder - or you are looking to digitize things that are in the public domain or close to it. RightsStatement will help you clearly limit your liability in case a copyright-holder shows up and makes a claim about something in your digital collection. You can state clearly things that are in the public domain, proclaim your uncertainty, or note that things have contractual or privacy restrictions unrelated to copyright. You can also label things as available for educational use or non-commercial use if you do wish to make an item’s in-copyright status really clear while allowing for fair use or fair dealing. I cannot state this enough: digitization does not give you copy rights. You do not become a creator of materials when you create digital copies. Creative Commons licenses are most likely inappropriate for you as an institution.
- Here are the labels in English and in French. The Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy is working on a Canadian copyright version of these labels as the originals are specific to US and Europe.
- Traditional Knowledge labels were also covered by Anna Naruta-Moya. They are excellent conceptually if you are trying to work through “How and when should this be available? To whom?” In some communities, access is mediated by time of the year, by elder status, by gender. You may find something similar is appropriate for your materials and your communities, so spend some time reading these over. I believe that if you wish to use these are more than just labels, that is, more than just suggestions of who should and shouldn’t be looking, you may need to develop your own code to take these labels as machine-readable and actually open up or close items from view based on the declarations of a logged-in user. Or more broadly by time of year, without a user having to specify anything about themselves. That would be a really delightful project to contribute to the heritage field at large. Which brings me to my next section!
- Who is maintaining it? Restoring it when it goes down? How quickly? Updating plugins? Security checkups? Error audits? Is it in their calendar? Is the technology sustainable and supported? For-profit or non-? Staffed or volunteer? Grant-funded? Do you have private materials? In the same platform or separate? At an in-house terminal? When will private items be opened up? Who will be in charge? Is it in their calendar?
- If possible, write descriptions and guides to the offline materials (raw large files, unrendered video, TIFFs, workflow and documentation, copyright assessments, etc.) that future staff will be able to understand, even if it’s future you. Organize things in a logical way that adds in some chronological ordering as well as by department/staff or task: Project name > 2022/01-Phase > 123-Archival Collection/Series/Box > Scans > files. One day someone might ask, “Why is this item tagged that way? Where did the vocabulary come from? Who authorized that? Why does it say it’s private? Who assessed that? How did you come up with that copyright date?” And you should be able to retrace any staff members’ steps to answer them. With precarious and transient project staff, this is doubly important. Don’t let any staff leave without giving you as much capacity as possible to recreate their work later. You should be able to confidently understand however your project files are being backed up - if you’re on an institutional shared server, know how many copies are being saved in the backend, how often backups are made, how quickly things can be restored. Keep two offline copies - ideally both RAID drives themselves - and in different physical locations in case of fire, flood, or etc. A 2-terabyte RAID1 (that’s two copies in one drive) that’s waterproof and drop-proof is about $400CAD. Much cheaper in the States.
- Internally, measuring and evaluation has value in tracking your activities and affects your continued planning: Knowing that there are scheduled goals and milestones provides structure to the activity; schedule meetings to discuss and present evaluations of ongoing outputs, quality, and impact also act as motivation; all of this provides opportunities for improvement and momentum for the project. Don’t forget to put in place tracking tools for your online collection so you also can measure external activity with the collection [motivation--ongoing measurement means there is always something to work toward hard facts and figures--measuring and recording productivity, success statistics, and running financial snapshots are excellent for informing and leveraging support from boards, donors, municipalities, etc. learn & improve--documenting progress helps improve the processes and approaches as a program continues Scheduling--project plan should include milestone goals Meetings & reports--be proactive about reporting to partners, boards, and even community groups--inform, incite interest, show motivation Documentation--document the process, any changes, job descriptions, etc. This will help when the program is reviewed, helps streamline, identify issues, re-jig workflows, etc. ]
- These slides are here for anyone interested in going back and taking a longer look. Feel free to ask about them in the Q&A.
- It’s important to see your long-term costs in both budgetary and in environmental terms. You can have a lesser impact on the environment by using fewer resources, which costs you less now, and contributes to costing less later when things get more expensive. Digital preservation as well as physical preservation will get more expensive in the future, and you have to understand your organizational capacity not just in terms of what you can sustain now, but in terms of what new costs will be beyond your means or control in the future.
- These are just a few resources to look into if you find you would like to do disaster planning as part of your long-term cost estimates.
- This is a really wonderful and important study that just came out a few months ago. Amanda Oliver asked Canadian archives about their disaster planning and whether they are taking into account the future likelihood of disaster based on increased floods, wildfires, geographically risky locations based on predictions for the near future. It covers digital preservation costs but also thinking about preserving physical materials based on changing temperatures and humidity, and whether digitization is a solution or just another problem.
- There are many calculations out there that will help you budget the future infrastructural costs of maintaining digital collections online and in a preservation system. I find these emissions estimates to be really interesting but you may simply wish to learn more for your own budgets.
- Another great presentation that helps you get thinking about your future commitments: needing new equipment, such as new hard drives, every five years, to change over the old ones holding all your project materials, as well as the hard drives in the servers that you are using to serve up your digital collections online, and whether your contract with an IT department or service covers those costs. It should! Some ideas to consider: Schedule high-energy, high-processing tasks (e.g. rendering video files, batch-conversion, batch-uploading) during off-peak energy times (e.g. overnight). Net-zero or carbon-offset digital infrastructure planning & calculations Solar- and wind-powered servers (or solar/wind-offset) www.colocationamerica.com/blog/data-center-solar-power Green roofs to offset emissions Boycott blockchain Divest investments & funds from fossil fuels Commit to sustainable future purchases (e.g. recycled materials, secondhand equipment)
- [Q&A with the webinar host(s) facilitated/supplemented by CLIR Grants Team]
- Found in Appendix A of the Applicant Handbook