Best Practices for Digitizing Photographs: A Network Analysis of Influences
Authors: P. Conway
Year: 2008

This paper presents the first signficant findings from a major study of how the tenns and conditions for building collections of digitized visual resources, particularly historical photographs, influence how users judge archival quality, integrity, and value (and hence usefulness) of the digitized resources. The paper articulates criteria for distinguishing best practice documents from general opinion pieces or reports on experiments. The paper than assesses the cumulative influence and power of seventeen guidelines documents on the development of best practice recommendations and a network analysis of the interconnected patters of influence by individual experts and leading organizations that have sponsored or contributed to the development of community best practices. Understanding Guidelines In the span of two decades, the keepers of cultural heritage have transitioned their approach to the digitization of visual resources, particularly historical photographs, from rarified experiments to nearly ubiquitous activity. In the United States the Research Libraries Group, Cornell University, the Library of Congress and other large organizations led early experiments. Today, digitization activities are widely dispersed, yet still relatively small in scale and generally uncoordinated. Erway and Schaffner suggest that it is only a matter of time before the scaling up of special collections digitization efforts forces a reassessment of procedures and policies. [221 Lynch asserts, however, that digitization is largely a solved problem. “The research questions are less about how to do it at all and more about how to optimize — how to do it more efficiently or effectively.” [281 In the vast number of smaller and more isolated non-profit organizations, significant uncertainty about practices and procedures remains deeply rooted, even as larger organizations position themselves for sustained programs. Standards governing most of the underlying technological aspects of building and sharing digital collections are in place and maintained by a variety of organizations, including the International Standards Organization [25] and its national counterparts, the World Wide Web Consortium, [40] and the Association for Information and Image Management. [18] Formal standards vary in specificity and their adoption runs the gamut from optional to required, depending on circumstances and the propensity of local practice to reflect the larger context of standards. Chapman suggests that a special challenge for the cultural heritage community is not the Lack of standards but the plethora of competing standards. [19] Rada concludes a sequence of case studies on standards development by arguing for a close investigation of how individuals or organizations influence formal processes. [35] Rather than codify their digital product requirements in national and international standards, libraries, archives, historical centers, museums, and similar organizations have opted instead tc develop best practices derived from practical experience. When communicated across institutions through the direct sharing of experience or promulgated more formally through published guidelines, best practices are a time-sensitive community consensus on technical comparability. [38] In an environment of rapid applications development, some see community consensus as superior to formal standards-generating processes, which may suffer from process formalities, questionable openness, and a lack of agility in response to technological changes. [39] Best practices for digital imaging tend to emphasize a combination of procedural recommendations for digitization and a range of recommendations on the significant properties of the image product itself, including but by no means limited to bitmap characteristics, and metadata elements describing digital objects. [30] Understanding the value and relevance of digitization guidance is becoming more important as cultural heritage organizations position themselves to increase the scale and variety of retrospective digitization programs to encompass visually or technically complex resources such as photographs, maps, and audiovisual resources. The United States has no national coordinating agency comparable to the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee, no natural forum for assessing crossinstitutional digitization practices in widely dispersed organizations, and no mechanism for reviewing ongoing digitization practices comparable to initiatives supported by Europe’s DELOS. [19] The absence of a research agenda that encompasses the creation of digitized products based on cultural heritage resources may also be problematical. [36] A comprehensive literature search yielded no evidence that any research has ever been undertaken to assess the value or impact of digitization guidelines and best practices produced over the past fifteen years in the United States. Liu’s assessment of digitization guidelines is haphazardly documented and reaches no specific conclusions about the recommendations within the guidelines. [26] Lopatin assembles a selective literature focusing on project management, funding, selection for digitization, metadata, and related matters but draws no conclusions about the origins, development or application of quality guidelines. [27] Puglia and Rhodes speculate that guidelines documents show a trend from low to high special resolution, from low bit to high bit image scanning, and from scanning for a specific purpose to a more “use neutral” manner. Their conclusion demonstrates the need for systematic investigation of past practices and future directions. “It is a little humbling to look back and admit that we I