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Special Focus Issue | ||||
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Introduction Author: Robin L. Dale - RLG (Robin_Dale@notes.rlg.org) |
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In the decade plus that cultural heritage institutions have been digitizing portions of their collections to provide enhanced access to an ever-growing community of users, the financial investment by cultural heritage institutions and supporting agencies has been huge. To date, the Library of Congress has digitized approximately two hundred thousand items in all media (books, manuscripts, photographs, films, sound recordings, newspapers, etc.).[i] Between 1998 and 2003, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) leadership grant programs funded over 123 projects, creating more than two million digital objects in all media and specifically over 675,000 images and more than 1.3 million pages of text![ii] In the UK, a variety of organizations including the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the New Opportunities Fund, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England have provided funding for the digitization of cultural resources. And after the digitization of millions of cultural objects, a lesson has emerged: with the high cost of the digitization process and the stress it puts on sensitive materials, only access in perpetuity can justify the cost of digitizing collections. Though early projects tended to digitize and document to a minimalist level, most cultural heritage institutions have now adopted a more mature approach of creating rich digital masters that will enable a multitude of uses over time. The digital images that museums, libraries and archives are creating have quickly become digital assets investments they need to manage and preserve, just as they need to manage and preserve their physical collections. But in the digital environment, the ability to manage and preserve information over time will be dependent upon metadata—both the kind of metadata and the level of detail collected. Until recently, this has been a potentially expensive proposition and is one to which most institutions have been reluctant to commit. Fortunately, a metadata framework for preserving our digital cultural heritage is emerging through the work of several international working groups, and projects and tools are being developed to facilitate more economic metadata capture and collection. To highlight these issues that affect both the digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage materials, this issue of RLG DigiNews will be devoted to the theme of preservation metadata. [i] These figures were obtained from the Library of Congress Ask a Librarian service on 4 October 2004. [ii] These are rough statistics supplied by Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), project coordinator of the metadata repository for IMLS digitization projects. Statistics are based upon a subset of IMLS grant projects thus far and granularity can be an issue in the way some digital objects have been reported. What is clear, however, is that statistics will be far higher when all inventories and data collections are complete. |
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