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FIU Digital Project Guidelines and Help Materials

The internal standard operating procedures for FIU Libraries' digital collections

General Workflow for Digital Projects

Selection

Select materials to be digitized or curated in your digital collection. See "Before You Begin a Digital Project".

Digitization or Gathering Born Digital

Before you begin, decide on the following:

  1. Unique identifiers
  2. File naming
  3. Folder hierarchy

It is best to be consistent across projects.

As you digitize items, note their FI# / unique identifier as their file name. If you also plan to create metadata records in a batch, it would be helpful to track the FI#s in a spreadsheet with the metadata you are collecting.

It is also helpful to use the FI#s to create your folder hierarchy.

When you scan items, you will be creating a high resolution master file for preservation. From the master file, you will later create derivatives for online access. See "Digitization Standards" for creating your digital files.

File Processing

File processing can occur in a number of imaging, audio, and video software tools.

For images, this may include cropping, deskewing, slight image color or contrast adjustment, creation of derivative files, batch renaming, OCR, etc. Some types of software used in the FIU Digital Collections Center include, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Limb, Abbyy, and Prime.

For audio and video, this may include editing for length, creating clips, removing "noise", creation of derivative files, etc. Some types of software used in the FIU Digital Collections Center include Adobe Premiere, Soundbooth, and Audition.

Metadata Creation

The FIU dPanther system uses the MODS Schema for metadata storage. However, you may choose to create your metadata in Dublin Core or MARC format. See the "Metadata" libguide for more information about schemas and the tools you may use to create metadata records for dPanther.

Metadata records may be entered directly into the dPanther system or created in batches using Excel.

Online Digital Collection

As stated above, there are multiple methods for adding your digital materials to an online collection in dPanther. For more information about dPanther workflows go to the "dPanther" guide.

FIU Partners may decide on a shared workflow model, where FIU's Digital Collections Center assists with the digital library ingest and preservation aspects of the project.

Preservation

For information about digital preservation in the FDA, visit the libguide page.

Quality Control

Quality control should be a part of every step of a digitization project. Taking the time to check your work along the way will save time in the end.