Resources

Digitization tutorials and guides

• Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging Tutorial. Cornell University Library's well-known online guide. Published in 2003.
• The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials. Released in 2002 by the Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, this is a well-considered overview of planning and managing digitization projects.
• NEDCC Handbook for Digital Projects. A classic published by the School for Scanning folks at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Boston. Contains information on project management, selecting materials, copyright, best practices, and digital longevity.
• TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images). Comprehensive and readable, the TASI site offers "advice on all digital imaging issues."
• NARA Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access. The latest (June 2004) technical guidelines from the National Archives.
• NC ECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) 2005 Digitization Guidelines. Kathy Wisser authored this very readable manual on digitization basics.
• Deciding Whether Optical Character Recognition is Feasible (PDF). This article by Simon Tanner of King's College Digitization Consultancy is an excellent overview of how OCR is done, including when it is -- and isn't -- practical.
• Measuring Quality Of Digital Masters. Curious about the factors that go into creating high-quality digital images? Read this explanation by Franziska Frey at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). It appears in RLG's Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging.

Copyright guides and tools

Tutorials

• Legal Issues to Consider When Digitizing Collections. An excellent tutorial by Jean Helig, published by the Collaborative Digitization Program. Scroll to Section III: Questions to Ask Yourself When Digitizing your Collection.

When does a work fall into public domain?

• When U.S. works pass into public domain. UNC's Lolly Gasaway created this excellent one-pager.
• Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. Peter Hirtle's chart covers works published in the U.S. and internationally.

What is "fair use"?

• Copyright Issues for Digitization (NC ECHO Guidelines Section 3.5)
• Primer on Copyright Use (University of North Carolina)
• Fair Use Checklist (Indiana University Copyright Management Center)
• Copyright and Fair Use (Stanford University Libraries)

What if I want to obtain permission?

• Permission to use copyrighted material (NC ECHO Guidelines Section 3.6)
• Sample permission forms (Indiana University Copyright Management Center)
• Securing Permission to Digitize and Display Collections Online (Digital Library of Georgia)

Metadata guides

• Metadata (NC ECHO Guidelines Chapter 5). A well-written guide on what you need to understand about metadata.
• North Carolina Dublin Core Template. NC ECHO offers this easy-to-use web template for Dublin Core metadata.
• NSDL Metadata Primer: Creating Metadata. A good summary of what you need to know to create descriptive metadata.