Digitization Project Proposal
rev. 8/8/2008

 

The purpose of this form is to assemble sufficient information about a proposed digitization project ...

  • to allow technical staff to assess the amount and type of work that would be required to carry out the project successfully and in a timely way;
  • to document the likely value of the project for students, scholars and researchers at Columbia;
  • to understand any additional factors that might bear on whether the project is approved and what priority given to its completion.

1. Project Working Title:

2. Date of Profile:

3. Selector / Requestor: 

4. Director's Signature:

5. Holding Library / Repository:

6.  Nature & Scope of Project:

  1. Nature of material to be digitized (e.g., collection name, subject or discipline-related content, chronological or geographical coverage, languages, etc.
  2. Number of bibliographic items / titles (e.g., volumes) and physical parts (e.g., images, pages) to be digitized, by type or format:
  3. Funding available:
  4. Deadlines / priority:

7. Value to Columbia Research & Teaching

  1. How would this project serve current, recognized research, study or curricular needs of Columbia?
  2. Which Columbia faculty members work / teach in the area covered by this project?   Have they indicated they would make use of these materials, or materials of this type, in digitized form?
  3. How heavily are the materials used now in their current paper (or other original) format?

8.   Value to Columbia Libraries Collections

  1. How would this project strengthen, complement or otherwise relate to existing paper (etc.) or digital collections at CUL?  
  2. Does this material relate to the collection development policies of the holding library or the Libraries as a whole?
  3. Are there other comparable or related digital collections already available publicly?  

9.   Conservation Issues

  1. Are the physical items intact, in good condition, able to be scanned / played back (e.g. audia, videotapes)?  If not, describe in general terms what types of physical problems are present.
  2. Estimate the number and types of items that would need to be conserved prior to or after digitization.
  3. If relevant, estimate the number of volumes that need to be disbound before scanning.
  4. Are the materials appropriately housed, or will rehousing be part of the project?

10.   Cataloging / Metadata Issues

  1. What cataloging / metadata exists at the collection level and/or the item level?
  2. If no metadata exists at the item level, how might needed metadata be created and by whom?
  3. Please provide a sample of the metadata that either exists or would need to be created for this project.
  4. For archival collections, have the materials to be digitized been fully processed and arranged?

11.  Special Processing / Functionality Needed

  1. OCR?
  2. Special presentation derivatives? (e.g., zoomable, multiresolution)
  3. GIS Encoding?
  4. Non-roman character sets?

12.  Rights and Permissions

  1. Are all materials to be digitized in the public domain?
  2. If not, how would permissions be obtained for items to be published online?
  3. For anything other than public domain materials or material for which we have obtained publication rights, please contact the Copyright Officer to discuss feasibility.

13.   Presentation / Publication Issues

  1. What kind of online publication / access is envisaged for the content of this project?  Current options include:   discovery and access through CLIO (only); discovery and access via Academic Commons, discovery and access from archival finding aids; stand alone online exhibition catalog; standalone Library Web site; specialized teaching and learning (CNMTL) Web site.
  2. Are there existing Web sites / online presentations at Columbia or elsewhere that resemble the kind of presentation needed for this project?
  3. What other assumptions are there about, e.g., OCR / full-text indexing, specialized image display, browse versus search functionality, RSS feeds, annotation / tagging by public users.
  4. Is this project a one-time effort, or do you expect more content or metadata to be added to the site over time?

14.  Project Management Issues

  1. Who will be participating in the project from the curatorial / reference side?  How much time will they be able to allocate to the project? Have they been involved in a digital project before? 
  2. Who will be preparing narrative content for the site, e.g., background material, about page?