Italian Semester of Presidency of the European Union

International workshop
Rome, October, 29th 2003, Palazzo dei Congressi, Bibliocom 2003

Borje Justrell
National Archives, Sweden

A Handbook on Good Practice in Digitisation

Abstract

The need for identification of good practice and centre of competence was highlighted in the Lund Principles and the following Lund Action Plan. In the Minerva project, which is based on these two documents, a special work package handles these issues.

For the practical outcome, this work package has chosen two complementary action lines: one connected to the web and one in the form of a practical and periodically updated handbook on good practice in digitisation.

The handbook contains a concrete and pragmatic set of practical guidelines for a clear target audience (teams within and across cultural institutions contemplating or already executing digitisation projects). It has a focus on cultural institutions in Europe (archives, libraries and museums).

The structure of the draft version is so far as follows:

• Background
• Practical Guidelines
• Standards
• Digitisation Guidelines: a selected list

The practical guidelines consist of the most important practical lessons learnt collected by Minerva and is focusing on a number of "rules of thumb". The disposition of these guidelines reflects the stages in the life-cycle of a digitisation project.

The chapter concerning standards gives the reader an overview of the most important and relevant technical standards. In the selected list of digitisation guidelines the most important guidelines published by different institutions and projects are examined and described in a standardised way.

A discussion forum about the handbook was open this spring on the Minerva website. The dissemination has continued during the summer and early autumn based on a revised version of the text. A final version (1.0) will be presented at a meeting of the National Representative Group in Parma in November this year