Below you will find some useful links to guidance around digitisation projects and activities.
PARBICA Recordkeeping for Good Governance Toolkit
The following guidelines looks at issues such as preserving authenticity and access, and dealing with technological obsolescence. Explains open and proprietary formats and provides examples of low-budget digital preservation solutions. Also examines the digital reformatting of analogue audiovisual recordings.
State Records New South Wales, Australia
Planning for digitisation covers most of the things you need to consider, from creating a business case, selecting the records and choosing an approach, to a practical checklist.
Case study: Housing NSW – Outsourcing the digitisation of client files is a case study and lessons learned from an exercise in back-capturing client files by out-sourcing the digitisation, with a view to disposing of the paper source records.
National Archives of Australia
Digitising accumulated physical records provides detailed practical advice on digitising paper records. It explains possible drivers for digitisation, planning considerations, preparation of source records and technical standards among other things.
Library of Congress, USA
Digital Project Planning and Management Basics (Microsoft PowerPoint) has a strong focus on business planning and case building, including grant applications and winning over stakeholders.
Arts and Humanities Data Service, UK
Digitisation: A Project Planning Checklist is a ten-step programme covering project design, implementation and long-term maintenance and use. It includes advice on how to estimate costs. Also includes a list of further reading.
History Data Service, UK
Planning historical digitisation projects contains general advice on all the elements you need to consider when planning a project.
Canadian Council of Archives
Step-by-Step Guide to Digitisation Projects is a list of other resources for planning, technical stuff, file formats, digital preservation etc. It is arranged by topic.
Archives New Zealand
AS/NZS ISO 13028: 2012, Information and documentation – Implementation guidelines for digitization of records is an international standard for creating digital images of paper source records that are of a quality that ensures they are functionally equivalent to the paper source. This standard has been adopted by Archives New Zealand and replaces its former Digitisation Standard. This focuses on the quality of the digitisation rather than strategy or project planning.
The National Archives, UK
Licensing digital images to commercial publishers (Microsoft Word) provides advice on what to consider when licensing your digitised content to third parties. This includes entering into agreements when third parties offer to digitise and make those sources available for you as a service. It is aimed at institutions that are designated as places of deposit for public records under the UK Public Records Act, but it could be useful to any archive.