Digitizing 101

Digitization. Everyone's talking about it, yet few have a firm grasp. Digitization seems to require substantial investment, since large institutions and Google have started massive projects, but there seem to be very few small libraries jumping in.

However, both large and small institutions should be comfortable with creating, managing, marketing, and preserving digital assets through scanning or otherwise digitizing paper-based (or analog) materials. As we will see, “being comfortable” means being both a generalist and a specialist at the same time.

Many institutions, including public libraries, are digitizing materials. Many public libraries—such as New York Public Library; Rochester Public Library, NY; Los Angeles Public Library; and Oshkosh Public Library, WI—are digitizing materials from their collections, including local histories, city directories, photographs, and newspaper clipping files.

Many are also involved in helping people find and use materials that have been digitized by other institutions. Whether a library is digitizing materials or just making digitized materials available, librarians need to understand some basic principles, including copyright.

In order to digitize, you must commit precious resources. Digitization requires access to funding, staff (yours or someone else's), and time. The most direct benefit of a digitization program is that materials once placed in electronic form can be organized and displayed on the Internet (or intranet) and made available to a broader range of people simultaneously. Several people can view the same photograph online at the same time, when previously, perhaps, only one person would have been able to view the photo at any given time.

When we think about digitization, we first think of materials that need greater access. Access can be extended because the materials can be viewed on the Internet and thus available to people anywhere in the world. You might think that this means less foot traffic, but instead it can mean that those who travel to your facility are better aware of what you have and know exactly what they want. Digitized materials can also increase the number of “hits” to your web site, which can demonstrate interest to funding entities.

When you digitize materials that normally have restricted availability (e.g., fragile books), you automatically increase access to those resources. For example, the digital files can be viewed without harming the original items. Will digitization hurt the original items? No. Care must be taken to ensure that the items are handled properly during digitization and digitized using nondestructive equipment.

Although digitization does not preserve those original materials, the originals are handled less because those who are curious about an item can now view the electronic version. It is desirable to keep the original items for researchers as well as those with a deep interest. Of course, if materials are being handled less, they will last longer, but in order for the materials to be preserved, they should go through specific conservation or preservation efforts. (For more, see “Why Digitize?” in Link List.)

The benefits of digitization may vary from program to program. We often use the phrase digitization project, but a project implies a limited duration. Because digitized materials require ongoing maintenance and preservation, it is more accurate to use the term program. For example, your biggest benefit might be access, while another program may benefit from the ability to enhance materials electronically so they are more meaningful.

Finally, the benefits of digitizing must fit into your organization's mission.For example, if your organization has a mission to allow anyone to view certain historic items, then increased access through digitization would support that goal. If a digitization program does not support the organization's mission, then the program may find that its support is only temporary. However, a program that does support the organization's mission may find it easier to flourish and become an integral part of what the organization does.

Selecting what you want to digitize is one of the most time-intensive tasks. Materials selection includes judging each item based on several factors, including enhancing access to materials that are under tight control (see Link List for more). Every institution will have slightly different criteria for deciding what to digitize.

The biggest challenge can be determining who owns the legal rights to the materials. At first blush, determining the ownership of legal rights seems like a simple proposition. But determining copyright ownership quickly can become thorny, requiring time, research, and money, especially for the vast majority of printed works that are not distributed by one of the nation's major publishing houses.

Copyright cannot be taken lightly, and it can greatly impact what materials are digitized and how they are used. Copyright is the set of ground rules that governs the creation, distribution, and reproduction of original thoughts that are captured or recorded onto some device.

Under existing U.S. copyright law, a copyright owner retains six core legal rights at the time a work is protected. Typically, four of these six rights apply to digitization programs: a) the right to reproduce (or copy) a protected work; b) the right to make transformative works based upon the original, protected work (the derivative work right); c) the right to distribute the work; and d) the right to display the work in public. A creator receives these rights automatically as a matter of law; no registration, publication, or notice is required. The other two rights concern performance of the work.

Once the creator receives these rights, he or she may do with them as he or she pleases. Typically, a creator who is a writer will assign one or more of these rights by contract to a publisher. If this occurs, then the publisher stands in the author's shoes and becomes the copyright owner. For the purposes of simplicity, however, we'll use the terms creator and owner synonymously. A copyright owner may be an individual or a business; it may be a public or private company; it may be a U.S. resident or a foreign citizen.

Copyright law applies to many artifacts that we may not automatically believe to be copyrighted, owing to how we have become accustomed to using materials. Copyright law applies to personal letters, photographs, journals, diaries, newspaper articles, obituaries, books, postcards, and pamphlets.

Let's say you are planning a digitization program and are considering digitizing a certain collection of printed materials—papers, letters, bound articles, and some monographs. How do you find out who owns the copyright? Unfortunately, there is no consistent, proven way to determine copyright ownership for printed materials. Therefore, if you want to digitize, you not only must determine whether permission is necessary (if you wish, consult an attorney), you must also track down the rights holder if you reasonably conclude that you must get copyright permission from that rights holder.

Your first inquiry into determining copyright ownership is your easiest: check the item to determine whether there is a copyright notice or contact information on the item itself. For a monograph, publishers usually place copyright information on the verso (or back of the title page). For recent works—say, from 2000 to the present—the verso information often is a reliable indicator of who owns the bundle of rights and how the owner may be contacted so you can get permission to digitize the information in that book.

The older the item, however, the more likely that determining ownership will become more and more difficult, especially since multiple changes of ownership become more common. For example, a book that is published in 1970 may originally have had one owner, but the original owner may have sold or otherwise transferred one or more of the bundle of rights to another party. This transfer may or may not be recorded in a searchable way.

Another possibility is that a publishing company returned the bundle of rights to the original author under a reversion clause in the publishing contract. In this case, contacting the publisher may not be useful—except as a way to find the author, who, depending on the reversion clause, now owns all the rights. If that author has died, then another party—heirs to the author's estate or the estate itself—might now own the rights. Again, these transfers all can happen without being recorded in a way that tracks the movement of the bundle.

If your item was copyrighted before 1923, you've hit the jackpot: you don't need to identify a copyright owner for any item that is copyrighted before 1923 because the work in question is in the public domain and therefore free to digitize without restriction. The public domain exception, however, covers a relatively small collection of printed material. Therefore, most librarians involved in a digitization program likely will have to engage in a bit of investigative work.

The Copyright Office's registry is another place to determine ownership. This free registry allows you to search registrations of books, music, films, and computer software. These searches, however, do not provide contact information or changes of ownership. A second Copyright Office database provides supplemental information about copyright ownership, including name changes and transfers of ownership. While both methods are a good start, neither is comprehensive because the Copyright Office's records can be sketchy owing to the lack of reporting requirements. In addition, rights can easily be transferred, unbundled, and rebundled.

Besides checking the records at the Copyright Office, you may also need to contact publishers, heirs of rights owners, and others who can help you locate the current rights owner(s) for rights you may require. For materials that are still under copyright protection (e.g., journals and diaries), you will need to use other resources beyond the Copyright Office to find and seek permission from the rights owner.

Once you have determined copyright ownership and overcome other legal challenges, you may believe that everything else related to digitizing materials is easy. In fact, the actual process for converting materials into a digital format is well known and documented. There are existing standards and best practices to follow.

Do you want to digitize the materials yourself? Before you say “yes,” consider the following questions:

• Will you be able to train or hire staff to operate the equipment so that the quality of the digital surrogates is high?
• Will you have the financial resources to upgrade your equipment regularly? Many programs are updating their equipment yearly, if not more frequently.
• Will your staff see digitizing as one more thing to do and not make it a ­priority?
• Although there is an explicit cost, would it be more efficient and effective to have a reputable digitization service bureau digitize the materials for you? Since the service bureau is dedicated to digitization, its equipment can be updated as needed and its staff will be well trained.

Deciding to digitize materials is a huge commitment. If it is a commitment that you can keep, then go for it. Otherwise, investigate your options for outsourcing that part of the program.

• How will your users access your materials? Will you load the items into your library catalog or will you invest in a content management system? This is a topic that requires much thought. We suggest that you look at the digitization programs created by other institutions and see what methods/software they have used. There are specific software solutions for digital content management, including CONTENTdm, DSpace, Greenstone (for a Greenstone project, see p. 6), and ArchivalWare, to name a few. Also, talk with your integrated library system (ILS) vendor to see if it has an option for storing your digital assets. It's also possible to roll your own archival system using open source software (see “Shoestring Digital Library,” LJ 7/06, p. 30–32).

Preservation is a huge topic, with workshops, tutorials, and conferences devoted to it. Digital preservation is something that you need to learn about, not only for these digital assets that you are creating but also for those born-digital files that you create everyday and rely on (e.g., MS Word documents, spreadsheets, calendars, presentations, etc.). For now, recognize that what you are creating will need to be preserved and schedule time to learn more about it.

How long will it take from when you start your digitization program to when you have materials available for your users to access? Depending on what you are trying to do, it can take months or even years. Consider starting with a pilot program to demonstrate value to your management and users. Then move from your pilot to your full-fledged program.

As we said in the beginning, at its base, digitization is converting materials into digital form. Yet there is much that goes into that simple thought, including knowledge of copyright and other intellectual property rights. It is important that you learn as much as you can about those things, as well as other aspects of digitization, if you want to begin your own program. It is also important to continue to learn, since some aspects of digitization (e.g., digital preservation) are evolving. The learning, though, will not become real until you begin. So—go ahead—find those things in your collection that are meaningful to a wide audience and start digitizing.