Online Professional Learning Network: Digitization

This is an assignment for the Hyperlinked Library MOOC that I am posting here, and then re-posting to my MOOC  blog.

GOALS:  Although I have numerous professional goals, the one that is my current focus is digitization.  I will be taking a course on digitization at SJSU  next semester.  I feel that this could the most crucial professional set of skills that I have yet to learn.  I don't just mean the act of digitizing objects.  There is also curation of digital objects and digital preservation. 

SCOPE:  I'm currently a student about to embark on a LIS career.  I'm discovering through this assignment that digitization is crucial to all professional paths of LIS.  I have thought of becoming an archivist where I would need to digitize finding aids and carefully selected items from collections. I have thought of becoming an academic librarian where I might need to digitize theses or dissertations for a institutional repository.  I have thought of becoming a law librarian who would help to preserve legal documents through digitization.  It's also possible that a public library might want to digitize oral histories from local individuals.  I was looking for people who would be experience resources, resources involving best practices, opportunities and approaches to digitization that I hadn't considered.

NETWORK:

 Individual Contacts

Lori Lindberg at Linked In  http://www.linkedin.com/in/msarchive

Professor Lindberg was the instructor who taught me Encoded Archival Description which is used to digitize finding aids.  This is the connection that was my starting point in digitization.

Emily Odza at Linked In http://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyodza

Emily Odza is a local librarian who is a relatively recent SLIS graduate.  Her internship involved digitization of a special collection.  I am interested in finding out more about what she learned.

Digitization Best Practices

Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov
 
There are links to guidelines for various formats and links to working groups for the still images and audio-visual formats.

 Oral History in the Digital Age Wiki  http://wiki.ohda.matrix.msu.edu/index.php/Main_Page

This is a wiki dealing with best practices for digitization of oral histories.  

Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials Wikihttp://wiki.lib.utc.edu/index.php/Technical_Guidelines_for_Digitizing_Cultural_Heritage_Materials

This is a best practices wiki maintained by the UTC Library Special Collections and Archives.

Digitization Blogs

Page to Pixel http://page2pixel.org/about/

This is the blog of Isaiah Beard, a digital curator at Rutgers University.  He establishes standards and workflows for Rutgers University Community Repository

Info Overdrive http://infooverdrive.com/author/tonybarbeau/

Tony Barbeau is a corporate blogger who is interested in digitization.  This is Kodak's document imaging blog.  He recently wrote about preserving digital images in the cloud.

Collaborative Manuscript Transcription  http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/

Ben Brumfield is an archivist blogger who is interested in collaboration between professionals and amateurs on digitization projects.

Free Government Information  http://freegovinfo.info/node/3961

I was attracted to this blog by a white paper presented at the ALA Convention in Chicago in June 2013 called Wait! Don't Digitize and Discard! which deals with the need for non-destructive digitization in order to maintain copies of paper originals for long-term preservation purposes.

You Tube

Inside Smithsonian's 3D Digitization Lab http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-2tLyTPs7Y

Smithsonian is digitizing objects in their collection in order to make replicas of them with a 3D printer.  National Geographic made this video.

Prezi

Oral History Projects From Interview To You Tube http://prezi.com/ozzqpnfhrpdt/oral-history-projects-from-interview-to-youtube/

This is a creative multimedia Prezi made by archivist Laura Ann Heller of the National Cowboy Museum detailing the entire process of doing oral history interviews, digitizing them and then making video clips for You Tube.  There's lots to learn here.  

NETWORK  MAINTENANCE PLAN

This network will be maintained on my professional blog, Information Metamorphosis. There will be new technologies, new best practices to deal with them, innovative projects, contacts and blogs to add to this network.  I hope to update it whenever I discover a new resource.  I may also need to update the links for the current resources.  This is a very exciting area of LIS.