Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal June 2005 Volume 3 (3)

CILIPS Conference

Managing digital imaging projects

"We are living in an image rich society; by the time they reach university, students will have seen more dvds than have read books," said Dr Andrew Grout in his Cataloguing and Indexing Group talk for Branch and Group Day. Edinburgh University Library's digital imaging projects were explained by Andrew and his colleague Jill Evans. They talked about funding, the selection of objects suitable to digitise, the methods of creating good quality images, and the adding of appropriate metadata.

Images of material are being created as a part of organised projects and individually on demand by university staff for teaching and research. Furthermore, the creation of digital images preserves delicate special collections items held by the library, by reducing the need to handle them. Their images are distributed far more widely than the items themselves could be, and the digital image can often be viewed in greater detail than the original object. The aim is for digital images to become an integral part of the Edinburgh University Library system.

In the past, the metadata created particularly for items digitised on demand was inadequate in a variety of ways. Without good metadata the image may lose meaning and be impossible to retrieve, said Andrew. This metadata should describe and identify the original object, but should also provide the technical information about the photographic image, its file size and compression.

The images' preservation is promoted by describing how they were captured and manipulated after creation. If the images are lost or destroyed, this information could be used to replace them. Each image should have a consistent identifier, so that it is not lost with data migration becomes necessary.

At Edinburgh, the Insight Image Delivery System was selected to manage the images, and VRA Core 3.0, which maps to Marc and Dublin Core, for metadata entry. Attempts to control the metadata vocabulary will help to promote interoperability with other systems.

Although most of the digital images within Edinburgh University are of library special collections materials, such as illuminated manuscripts and Shakespeare quartos, and some museum items, images of all kinds are increasingly important to public and special libraries, museums, schools and businesses. Images are used for a variety of uses promotional, commercial and educational. It will be increasingly important for all kinds of institutions to capture, store and record and exchange these images.

This talk addressed the challenges of such projects and pointed to some solutions to the problems encountered.

Kathryn Penfold, University of Edinburgh

Information Scotland Vol. 3 (3) June 2005

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