Survey of Digitization

This class is officially an introduction to the issues and trends in digitization initiatives and management, including project planning and management, asset delivery and management systems, interoperability and the importance of standards, copyright and other legal issues, metadata basics digital preservation, and specific digitization processes for documents, images, video, and sound. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Unofficially, it's a fun class with lots of hands-on projects with real collections and archives and some theory (yes theory!) about the objects (text, images, sound, and moving images) we'll be digitizing. Some questions we'll consider:

• Why digitize? What is the cultural significance of the collections or objects we'll be digitizing? And how will digitizing make them more accessible or preserve them?
• What are effective work flows that repurpose existing descriptive material, rather than creating new metadata?
• What are the most efficient work flows that keep costs reasonable but also follow prescribed standards for sustainability and preservation?
• How do we begin to create well-designed plans that evaluate the use of the digitized materials and the effectiveness of the methods employed in digitizing and
  displaying the materials?