If you have personal or organizational collections of historical material, UNO Libraries' Archives and Special Collections is a potential archival repository for this material. Contact Amy Schindler, Director of Archives and Special Collections, to discuss a potential donation. Thinking about scanning your collection before donating it to an archival repository? Talk with the archivists, librarians, or museum curator before you begin your project.
Prepare the materials you wish to digitize prior to getting started. Taking a few minutes to ensure your materials are ready to be digitized will reduce opportunity for damaging content and help ensure that you can scan things efficiently.
Once-over Look Through
How do things look? Fragile? Sturdy? Are there many different formats that will need to be digitized on separate pieces of equipment? Depending on your equipment and set-up, you may need a book cradle for bound columes, a large acrylic sheet to smooth material flat, or book snakes and spatulas to hold pages flat. Simply get an idea of what the project has in store for you.
Handling and Prep for a Variety of Formats
Folders of Material:
Remove staples and paper clips. Whether your scanner has an automatic document feeder or is a flatbed, any lingering metal can cause damage. Pay close attention as sending a staple through the feeder or scrapping across the flatbed results in damage to both the archival material and the equipment.
Physicaly rotate your pages as needed to keep information organized. You could also replace metal clips with paper clips at this time if you are concerned about keepting the material together as it exists.
Unfold any materials that are folded, smooth creases (“gently manipulate”) to increase the success of a clear scan/capture.
Binders of Loose Material:
The first step here will likely be to rehouse the material into folders. Remove staples and paper clips, smooth/unfold as you rehouse. If your material is described in an inventory, document your changes as you go.
Loose Things in Boxes:
The first step here will likely be to rehouse the material into folders. Remove staples and paper clips, smooth/unfold as you rehouse. If your material is described in an inventory, document your changes as you go.
Bound Volumes:
Page through the volume to check the margins, smooth dog-eared pages, lightly brush out crumbly detritus to ensure that the scanner or capture platform/bed stays as clean as possible. Note the fragility of the paper and how tight the binding is. You’ll want to be aware of how carefully you need to handle the material while you are scanning/capturing. Consider the physical condition to determine the equipment you'll use. If you have the equipment, consider using a camera or overhead scanner rather than a flatbed scanner to reduce pressure on book binding.
Photos/Negatives/Slides
Suggestion for File Naming
Be consistent, meaningful, and intentional; you want your files to be searchable.
Consider the following resources from UNMC and Harvard for creating useful file names.
Recommended File Formats
Typically, you'll create the archival masters when you scan. These are the digital objects that you do not edit; save them as they exist and represent the original object. Create duplicates to use as your production masters. These are the copies you produce your access copies from; you can edit these if that aligns with your philosophy and access needs. Access derivatives are usually the smallest and usable file size and type. Store your archival masters separately to prevent the likelihood of loss due to damage.
Archival masters: uncompressed TIFF, PDF/A
Production masters: JPG2
Access derivatives: JPG/PDF
Consider the FADGI: Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultrual Hertitage Materials (2023)
Equipment
Flatbed scanners that offer the ability to digitize paper, photographs, and transparent materials are very accomodating for many needs.
Overhead scanners and camera capture may be most appropriate for digitizing bound volumes and oversize materials to reduce the opportunity for damage from handling.
Sheet-fed automatic document scanners may be appropriate if you have modern collections containing primarily standard paper.
Camera capture (using a tri-pod along with other tools) can provide the fastest digitization option if you have the appropriate physical space and lighting to support the effort.
Digitization Standards for Reflective and Transparent Materials
The standards you follow for digitizing may depend on many resource factors such as your available time, equipment, and storage. The higher resolution you choose to digitize/capture at, the larger your file will be. The same is true for bit-depth selection, file format, and color vs. greyscale. Consider the FADGI Guidelines; you may not be able to achieve the 4-star rating, but what is the best archival reproduction you can create given your circumstances? Consider what you need to do with the reproduction. Will it need to be enlarged? Will you publish it online and allow users to "zoom in" on it? Do what you can with the resources you have available to you, while keeping in mind the preservation and access goals of archival digitization.
The following lists some general guidelines and assumes fairly standard sizes. For any material needing to be enlarged and/or printed, you will need to manually calculate PPI (pixels per inch to capture/scan) to ensure accurate DPI (dots per inch for printing, aim for a standard 300DPI). For manual PPI/DPI calculations, consider the Printing and Scanning Resolution DPI Calculator (PPI) .
Scanning Standards
Documents - General Collections and Unbound Manuscripts
Bound Volumes - General Collections and Special Collection Manuscripts
Printed Photographs and Graphic Materials
Photographic Transparencies (slides and negatives)
35mm up to 4”x5”
larger than 4”x5”