The grant allowed WFU and FCPL to purchase equipment for five digitization centers at library locations throughout Forsyth County (Z. Smith Reynolds Library and four FCPL locations: Central Library, Walkertown Branch Library, Lewisville Branch Library, and the Malloy/Jordan East Winston Heritage Center). In addition, it provided funding for guest speakers to do preservation and digitization instruction in a day-long workshop format. The first of the five workshops was a pilot, followed by another session reserved for members of local community organizations (postcard announcements were sent to everyone from the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society to the local railroad history appreciation society). Subsequent sessions were open to the general public.

One thing we recognized after the sessions became open to the public was a strong interest in preservation and digitization. Community members brought in yearbooks, photo albums, family bibles, and other items as well as lots of questions about how to use the flatbed scanner, VHS to digital converter, audio cassette to digital converter, and slide scanner. Barry Davis, Digital Production Coordinator at ZSR, helped create online guides to using the equipment and will be posting online videos demonstrating both physical preservation and how to use the equipment. Local families, history societies, and organizations hold small but valuable records of our community’s past — and they want to preserve them.

After demonstrating the use of the digitization equipment, the public was informed that they could participate in Digital Forsyth by sharing their digital and digitized photos through the Digital Forsyth Flickr group (also available through the Digital Forsyth community page). The group’s page notes that images may be harvested for use in Digital Forsyth. We ask participants to post other formats to YouTube, Internet Archive, and Scribd, since we do not provide storage space for these materials. These local digital collections, ideally, can be shared in multiple ways. Training for how to use the equipment will continue through the Forsyth County Computer Training Bridge at various locations around the county.

With the grant wrapping up at the end of this month, I have had time to reflect on how I think the project could have been improved. While organizations and the general public were thrilled with free seminars about hands-on preservation, organization, and digitization, we did not spend much time talking about what would be done with materials post-digitization. Concepts like metadata and digital storage are only briefly touched upon and could be emphasized in the future. In addition, there is still potential for the community to participate in a larger version of Digital Forsyth that collocates multiple digital formats to preserve the many layers of this area’s history and culture. In sum, it has been a joy to experience firsthand the effort to include personal collections and community-based archives in the discussion about digitization.

Since starting my position as a project archivist at Wake Forest University just over a month ago, I have begun formulating the concept of a digital collections program and team. Many of our digital projects have been exhibit- and project-based, making workflow irregular and interface design somewhat incongruent. A consultation from Lyrasis (and its supporting report) a few months before my arrival echoes these concerns: “[a] goal is to move forward from embarking on disparate digitization projects, which may have little or no relation to each other in how they are planned or conducted, to a policy-based, strategically-planned digitization program.” My initial reaction: how?

The phrase “policy-based, strategically-planned digitization program” became my mantra. After talking with the many library faculty involved with digitization projects in the past, I came to the conclusion that we all wanted the same thing: direction and a process. Before I arrived, a tech librarian developed selection criteria, a workflow, and a “digital projects process” proposal that included a digital projects advisory group. His ideas were excellent, but it appears that library faculty were not yet on board with the concepts he described. Today, the need for a formal digitization workflow (from selection to completed metadata and beyond) as well as a digital collection development policy and team is clear.

First, I am wrangling in the digital projects that were created before we converted to dSpace (the former were created using Encompass and there are metadata conversion issues). Our tech team is working incredibly hard to write scripts and convert corrupted XML files into usable metadata for use with already digitized special collections resources. My role is to make sure that the metadata is clear and complete, as well as to shake out any existing issues with file naming or digital arrangement. There are a few digital collections that were artificially created (grouped by format, for example) that do not identify the originating record group or fond, so this is a small fix that can help researchers access the appropriate collection or fond when they want to know the provenance of a digital object from our collections.

Second, I am working to bring together folks from special collections and technology and preservation and copyright to form a “task force” with discrete goals in mind: to create a digital collection development policy and to create a digital collection proposal process. We might have to work on the naming, but the goals will be clear. For me, a digital collections program is not complete without criteria for selecting the next big or little digital project (and even some guidelines for scan-on-demand). Once these policies are developed, the group will shrink to a smaller advisory group (as proposed by my colleague) that makes decisions collaboratively about appraisal, selection, and nomination of digital projects/collections.

Sort of simultaneously, I will wear my other hat as processing archivist to create a basic inventory of unprocessed and underprocessed collections/fonds so that we can have a better idea of what we have physically/intellectually. If you don’t know what you have, how can you prioritize what should be digitized next? Of course, being an archivist, I want to consider ways to connect finding aids to digital objects…but that’s another post or two.

So where does that leave us? In the meantime of forming the task force, I am doing research to see what other institutions have developed. I’ve got the NC ECHO digitization guidelines in hand, as well as resources/policies from Berkeley’s Digital Publishing Group, Digital Collections at ECU, U Pitt’s Digital Research Library, the NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, and the NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. Because I went to library school at UCLA, I also have experience working with the California Digital Library and its tools. I know there is a lot of reading and learning to be done to ensure that our process is successful. We are planning a visit to ECU later this spring to see how they formulated their practices, but I am also interested in what other institutions are doing. Do you have any guidelines or tools that you have found particularly useful in developing your own policies and digital collections?