Assessing, Digitizing, and Delivering Library Collections: Scoping Oxford's Resources

Assessing, Digitizing, and Delivering Library
Collections: Scoping Oxford's Resources

Stuart
Lee

Centre for Humanities Computing
stuart.lee@oucs.ox.ac.uk

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

In 1998 the University of Oxford, funded by the A W Mellon foundation, initiated
a scoping study into its digitization activities -- past, present, and future.
The report aimed:
to document, analyse and evaluate Oxford's current digitization
activities, as a basis for assessing the effectiveness of the various
methodologies used;
to investigate the possibilities for building on the existing
project-based work and for migrating it into viable services for library
users;
to develop appropriate selection criteria for creating digital
collections in the context of local, national, and international
scholarly requirements for digital library products and services;
to make recommendations for further investment and activity within the
Oxford libraries sector and potentially within the UK research libraries
community.

This paper will outline the methodology used by the study and present its
findings. In particular it will outline the following:
Survey of potential projects - The study formulated a series of
questionnaires and interview sheets for use with existing digitization
projects, and potential digitization projects. These, and the subsequent
results, will be outlined.
Assessing projects - The paper will present some of the problems in
assessing a collection for digitization using appropriate case studies
from the colleges and libraries at Oxford.
Digitization, Metadata, and Access - The study performed a reasonably
detailed analysis of activities (both within Oxford and outside of
Oxford) related to the digitization process used, the metadata systems,
and the access procedures. These will be outlined in the paper with
appropriate references to further readings.
Workflows and Business Plans - The study was asked to produce a robust
set of assessment criteria for digitization projects as well as a full
business plan and model for an on-demand digitization service for the
University. In addition it was asked to expand this to a digitization
service that could manage project sized collections. Using the services
of the Higher Education Digitization Service (UK) these have been
produced and will be outlined in the talk.

Above all this paper seeks to outline the procedures adopted by the study and the
recommendations Oxford has derived from it, with the hope that these will be of
use to other institutions who are seeking to set up a digitization service, or
to move their reprographics unit into the digital age.
The study was conducted by Stuart D Lee, Head of the Centre for Humanities
Computing, University of Oxford, and was overseen by a project steering
group.