 Susan, welcome everyone. Hello. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad you're joining us today. I'm just going to say a few words about the community and about these webinars, and then we will get started. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History, and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we've drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the bookshelf and the raising of our workshops and webinars. And we have links to all those resources filed under the topics menu on the site. And we'll also file a recording of today's webinar there. So about twice a month, the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource, and we host a webinar related to it. The resource that we posted for today can be accessed by clicking this photo on our web page, which is at www.connectingtocollections.org. So today, I'm pleased to welcome our featured expert, Robin Dale, who's the Director of Digital Services for Lyrasis. Thank you, Robin, so much for joining us today. Would you like to talk a little bit about yourself? Sure. So thank you, actually. I should say thank you to you and Kristin for the invitation to speak with everyone today. I actually, at Lyrasis, have a few different hats, I'm sure many of you do. But some of my work is involved in what we highly call digital services. And that would be things like digitization from smaller activities all the way up through mass digitization activities. We do education and training and classes on how to train yourself and phase up. I also work with our NEH Preservation Field Services program, so we do a lot of traditional preservation as well. And finally, I also am the Lyrasis operations manager for technology services, because as we know, many people are looking to have people host their content. And so that's one of the other options that we have. OK, great. Thanks, Robin. So we have some poll questions, but I think we're going to start those when we get a little bit into the presentation. I'll collapse this one. And bring yours over. There we go. All right. Excellent. Thank you very much. So we're going to begin with, as Elsa said, a couple of different poll questions that we have. And that's going to help, I think, all of us both figure out where we are and who our colleagues are on the phone. But I just wanted you to know some of this may seem like it's the perspective of larger organizations. And actually, I want to encourage you to think the other direction. While I used to work with very large organizations in a former position, in working with Lyrasis, we work with many, many smaller organizations and so that's our goal here is to talk about what a lot of the options are that are available to people today. This is just a really kind of high level overview agenda, just so you know some of the things that we're going to touch on. And there's a lot built into there. But please feel free to ask any questions. And I'm happy to hit those questions either as we go along or in the later session. Go ahead and advance this one here. And now I think we're going to get ready for one of our poll questions. So one of the things that's going to help me talk with you today and really make sure that I'm providing relevant examples to you is if we know where you're coming from organizationally. So there's a poll question that's going to be coming up for you now asking you to let us know what type of organization that you're from. If you guys could just take a moment and quickly click on that for us. OK, it looks like the majority are from a museum. And we do let people select all that apply because a lot of people come from an institution that has a couple of different aspects of these different kinds of organizations to them. Here we go. I was going to say that makes complete sense. And now people are kind of clicking a few more. And that's great. Yeah, yeah. And I think we have actually, if we go on right before, we have the helps a lot. So thank you. If we are thinking about digitization, we'd also like to get an idea of how many of you are thinking about working on a digitization project or are actively engaged or in the planning stage. So we have our next poll coming up. And should I pull over the third poll too? Sure, that would be great. OK, so 60% have worked or are working on a project right now in-house, 15% combination. So that's actually a little bit more towards what I was expecting from people. And we'll get into some numbers later in terms of who is actually outsourcing. And actually I would say right now, the average that we have here of people on the webinar today, you guys actually are outsourcing less than most of the people out in the community, just to give you an idea of how prevalent it's become. And I think part of it is because it's a little easier. But I want to dispel the notion of it being one or the other. So outsourcing or in-house, that was a little bit of a tricky question that we pulled on you there. So why don't we go ahead and we can go back to the presentation and I'll run through. There are going to be a couple other questions here that I'm just going to have you consider as we go through. But I often want to encourage people to think about things in terms of the project themselves. So we've just answered this question here. And we have, in terms of how many people have considered using a vendor, it's a little bit harder to tell what a poll. But I know that fewer of you have gone with some sort of vendor for a project, any portion of your first project, or even ongoing. So my next question, and this one is hard, and I did not get this to, I didn't send this poll question to Elsa and she was great to put together those others. But I wonder how many of you have state-based collaborative digitization programs in your state? And it would be, since sometimes they're hard to identify, it's one of those things that we encourage people to investigate. And I'm going to explain why. It seems like a tricky question in here, but I'll explain that as I go through. And then the last kind of reality check question I usually ask people when I'm giving a presentation or talking about working without sourcing is how many of you actually have a trusted partner organization that you would trust to work with that has an in-house digitization facility? Because I think what a lot of people think about in doing first projects and in doing projects as they go along is the best thing they want to do is they want to bring it all in-house. And they want to learn by doing. And that is definitely one of those advantages of working on doing in-house digitization. But I think there are some other things that we can think about. But these days, there have been really great changes to the way we think about outsourcing. And now we're not only talking about the traditional definition, but a newer one. So let me go ahead and move on to that for you. So the first thing is what I was just talking about here. I really want people to think about this issue of working with outsourcing as not being a competition within the house. And I know that time and money are often short. And we often try to pull in things and really keep all of our activities in the house. But there are great advantages to going ahead and working in an outsourced fashion, at least on some components of your project. Because even if you say that you're outsourcing, I bet that almost all of you that answered that earlier poll did a bunch of these in-house components of the digitization project you see here. You probably did your own selection. You figured out which content you wanted to digitize. You and uniquely you, not your vendor, knew what the purpose of your digitization was. What were your user needs? Why did you choose certain specifications? Why did you digitize or scan to a certain level and specification? Why did you choose certain content? So those are all important things. You usually also best know the metadata and what your users will want and what content to put into metadata fields. And then lastly, you also, I'm sure, had some level of quality control, whatever if you sent anything out to an outsourcing service provider. I'm sure you looked at it, or at least a portion of it, when it came back. So when people talk about outsourcing as an outsource versus in-house, I really want you to think about things here in terms of that being sort of a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose. In fact, you can do variations on a scale. So a moment ago, I mentioned that things have changed greatly. When Elsa and I first started talking about this presentation, it was based on a publication I did for the Northeast Document Conservation Center way back in 2006. And the scene in 2012 has changed so greatly in terms of digitization because of some of the large scale projects we have going on. And not only projects like the Google Books Project, which is a very focused and content perspective project, but also because of the nature of the way people started working with other organizations, not just on their own, but the great rise in collaborative work together and beginning to use existing infrastructure. So when we talk about outsourcing, I want to be really clear that I'm talking about two different paths here. I want to talk about some of the things you need to think about are related to content, so the types of content that you might want to do outsourcing with. And also, it's about the kinds of service providers. We used to have a fairly negative view or a worried view about working with vendors. And I think that's changed greatly, and I'll talk about that in a second. So if we move away from this idea about kind of defining what outsourcing is, I actually want to kind of challenge us to say, let's talk about redefining outsourcing. Because this is that model where we're talking about working with service providers, and we think about it as this business relationship, it's a profit-based vendor, and the services are all available, hopefully, at a market cost, hopefully not over that. And you see some of the vendors that I have. I have their logos here on the screen, PTFS, Backstage Library Work, Hudson Microimaging, CureTalk, which actually sells equipment and offers services and digital divide data. And those are just a few that I'm aware of, and I happen to put here, it's not at all exclusive. When we think about things, we worry about sending our content off, or we wonder about contracts we have to have, or who else they've worked with, and these are all very important things to think about here. But these aren't the only service provider relationships that we need to think about anymore. And I would encourage you, highly, as smaller organizations and as museums to think about some of the new kinds of outsourcing that you can do. And this is where I'm going to redefine it on this screen here. More and more, as I said earlier, we have partnerships and collaborations that have grown over the past five to 10 years, but especially in the last five years. And those are because of the nature of the funding agencies and grants that we've received that encourage collaboration. They also now have turned to the point where they feel like they've funded a lot of infrastructure for organizations, and they don't easily fund getting equipment anymore, and it's certainly not large-scale equipment for people to be able to use. They want people to be able to leverage the infrastructure that's been put in place in terms of some of the expert regional centers that have cropped up in the last five years. We also have a lot of work that's taken place in state-based digital collaboratives. And there's actually a survey that's going on right now with state libraries, archives, museums, record management agencies, and whatever the higher-level agencies are within each state. They all have different names. So let us know which state-based collaboratives are still in existence, that are still funded, if they get funding for this kind of activity. And that's going to be important in just a minute. But something, for example, like the South Carolina Digital Library that I have the logo here on the bottom right, this is an activity where that state gets LSTA funding. And they have subdivided the state into three sections. We have the Low Country, the Midlands, and Upstate South Carolina. And they have a regional spam center based at a partner organization. And all of the organizations, museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, historical houses that want to get digitization done send it to one of those three specialized centers. And the funding is provided through the LSTA grant funding. And all of the content goes back to the South Carolina Digital Library as well as locally. Other organizations might be subject to genre-based programs. And so you see the Biodiversity Heritage Library here. And that's a funded activity where they have a very focused center. And they've created and they use regional spam centers. And people contribute to a greater content. They follow certain standards. And they have funding that's made available to them through a variety of sources, including this Sloan Foundation. The Boston Library Consortium is very much like South Carolina Digital Library in the sense that over time, through the Boston Library Consortium and with work of the Boston Public Library, they have services that are available to Massachusetts based organizations. And they do calls for proposal where you can say you want to digitize a certain amount of content. People from the Boston Public Library will drive out to your location and talk with you. If you're successful, they'll drive out to your location and pick up your content, drive it back to Boston Public, and they'll digitize it there. The Digital Public Library of America is a really new and exciting activity. And I want to do sort of a hold this space here. But I know that there's a lot of funding that's going to be emerging, including some fun activities that you might have heard that they've talked about, the scan of bagos, which is this idea that they'll have several Winnebagos that have been stripped out of their comfort and will be filled as a mobile scanning center. And it'll be able to go out to historic organizations that can't ship or won't ship or don't want content to leave their site. And they'll digitize it and help them with a metadata enhancement and metadata services on site and then contribute it back to the Digital Public Library of America. And then I have lyricists here because while we don't own scanning equipment ourselves, we actually work with regional service centers and a granting agency to provide best-priced services. And that's available to anybody, not just lyricist members. So there are a lot of varieties out there where you have not your typical for-profit organization offering digitization services of all types and kinds. And I would highly encourage you to think about this as a choice for you when you're thinking about outsourcing. And I mentioned earlier about who's doing the outsourcing when you were answering the poll. Well, so here's an idea here. Back in 2002, the network information, well, I'm going to mess up Ninch's name here. And I had it in just a second ago. But Ninch was an organization which is now defunct. And it did a survey of organizations. And they found that 50% of larger organizations, and that was a really big key, 50% of larger organizations were outsourcing content. In 2008, a group that goes out and does polls and surveys and then publishes their work did the next comprehensive survey that was available out there. So by 2008, in six short years, they found that 49% of the organizations that responded, in this case, there was a great diversity of size of organizations. So 49% of those organizations had outsourced some or all of their digitization work. And museums were more likely than others to do that. And I thought that that was really interesting. And I've checked this with my colleague, Lynn Grinstead in Colorado. And she finds that this is often the case as well. And the last bit, we've seen a little bit of a shift, a further shift, and somewhat of a recognition of our, shall we say, economic soft time, that by 2011, when the primary research group survey was redone, they actually found out that while digitization services and activities had dropped within the US, it had shifted so that almost everybody was outsourcing that responded. And in fact, almost everybody that responded had outsourced at 27% on average of their digitization work or more. So my point in this, and in trying to provide these statistics, is to let you know that you have a lot of colleagues out there that are doing this. And certainly we've now moved to a point that more organizations are at least considering a sort of hybrid approach that we're definitely still doing in-house work. We may even do some in-house digitization. But there are economic issues that are encouraging us to consider other options. So as far as what we're doing outsourced today, there are a lot of things that people don't necessarily think about. And again, this is part of the full digitization chain. I talked earlier about some of the things that you can maintain in-house. But what else is being done? Well, we have original materials preparation. I know a lot of people are being flattening of documents and things that are found in archival collections so that they can be adequately handled and then digitized. We have things like photo consolidation and things that happen to stabilize them before they can be digitized. We have cleaning of audio recordings and some of the things that either vendors or service providers will demand in order to get the best available digitized copy. So we have all of those sort of preparation things that can happen beyond digitization. We also have encoding. A lot of organizations are doing encoding now. More and more, and I mentioned earlier with DPLA, are providing metadata services. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. There's some core metadata that your organization can provide. And when you're working with some of these organizations, there are some other metadata that can be provided beyond descriptive metadata. And this is very important in terms of technical metadata and preservation metadata and things that are going to be needed if you're contributing your content to other organizational sites or hubs, if it's being harvested by someone so it can appear in another site or if it's going to be available through the Digital Public Library of America. I think these are all really important things to think about in terms of services that can be provided beyond the in-house. File processing anything from OCR if you're doing documents, printed documents. Access systems is something that used to not be very popular and more and more it is. And I think there have actually been some newer and better developments lately for programs that are available for museum programs. And I have to admit that when I was talking earlier with Elsa and Kristen, I had to say I'm really reluctant to say anything in terms of a past perfect because I worked with a lot of people trying to contribute those collections to other organizations and they had a really hard time getting the content out of that system. Or we worked with other people that were having a really hard time getting content into that system. Though it is a nice system, the learning curve was fairly great for some of the smaller organizations with whom we worked. Nicely, they have this newer product out called Past Perfect Online. And I think that's a really great option and there are a lot of low cost things that better meet certain communities in ways where previously we had things like content DM only. And that's a fantastic system too. I've worked with it personally in previous positions. I've taught it to people. I taught it to my library and archival students when I was teaching. But it's very large and it does certain things very well. But just understand that these kinds of access systems are available and more and more prevalent and we can provide examples to that. And then the last thing that I believe is most important for a lot of you is this idea of digital preservation and file backup services. It's just not sufficient anymore to take your content and get it back from the vendor and put it in your access system and then leave the content either on DVDs or on external hard drives or something like that. Because that's not a great backup mechanism. Every day with my technology hat on, I run into people who have lost data. And there have been some large studies about this. So more and more services that provide access systems will also provide you with either file backup. They'll guarantee you get exactly back what you put in or they'll do additional digital preservation services. Please understand that access systems generally do not provide that. They make sure you can see it every day. But the long term management is less there. And it's usually not for your master or files or largest files. So I want to run through a couple of these things. And I should say this presentation is based on the earlier publication from 2006 that we completely redid. And it's available and also has it in a window here today. And it's also available on the Lyrisis website. And there's a citation for it at the end. Do you want me to pull it over now? Yeah, that would be great. So here's the document itself. You can't download directly from this window. But we do have a window that you can download from. It makes a little bit bigger for everybody there. There's also a full though. I'm sorry. I was going to point out to the audience there is a full screen toggle there too. But realize if you push that, then you're not going to have access to the chat because it will take over everything. Currently, this is available in PDF. And as I said, it's freely available to anybody that would like it. We've renamed it slightly. So people understand that it's about outsourcing, but there's a strong, as you can tell, a bit of a proponent background to it. And that really is based on what we've heard from our members and the big changes that we see in the scenery here. But certainly welcome to that. But as a component of that particular publication, if we can reduce this and go back to the presentation itself, could I just? Sorry, I'll just say that we'll make this available also on the Connecting to Collections online community page where this recording is with the presentation. Thank you so much. So when people are thinking about doing projects, and I know a lot of you now that we've had the pull, a lot of you have done these. But if you're thinking about, why should I do this? I've already done this in-house. Let me run through. I kind of have four slides here that we're going to go through and talk about what some of the advantages and disadvantages are of each. Because certainly while I'm a proponent of occasionally using outsourcing as necessary, I also realize that there are some disadvantages. So let me go ahead and roll through these with you. So this is one of the things I started off with. And I said, well, most people want to start a project in-house because there are so many advantages of doing it. You have so much control over what you can do. You're learning by doing. And so the just do it mentality is something that a lot of us have. And we can control the entire process if we keep things in-house. It's also really important if you're doing the digitization work. And in this case, I'm thinking of images or text and things like this, that you can define requirements incrementally, meaning you can digitize a few things at the specifications you think you're going to need. And after you look at them and use them and do quality control on them, if you decide that that's not enough to meet your needs, you can go back and raise or lower if you need to your requirements. This is not the case when you're working with a vendor. So that's one of the really nice things where I should say it's not as easy if you're working with a vendor. So by retaining that direct control of all of the different parts of a project, you can, you're maintaining all of those activities. You have that control. You can also make sure a lot of these things are your precious objects. Our collections are the thing which we're all working for and we want to make sure that they're not only available, but they're preserved and they're cared for. And so you can ensure their security and proper handling if you keep them in a house. And I think that the last part is this idea of about the primacy of the requirements. We've had a lot of vendors appear and in some cases fortunately disappear over these last 10 years of intensive digitization. And a lot of them have gotten in the game from the document imaging side of the house. And when I say document, I don't mean archival documents. I mean bank checks, people who are running things through sheet feed scanners. And so they don't necessarily know the requirements that we would want as people who are stewards of cultural heritage organizations and collections. So you can eliminate that from concern if you're doing it all in house. But there are really large, large disadvantages. It takes a lot to get going. And I'm going to say this, and it's also in the publication that you'll see. There's a lot of discussion out there about this now within the Digital Public Library of America. But in general, it is not sufficient to go out and get a scanner, sort of $300 scanner at Office Depot. And I know a lot of organizations with whom I've worked have done that as their first project. But the problem is there's a lot of variation when you get into scanners that are at that consumer level rather than the prosumer or professional level. And so when you're talking about setting up something to do in-house, not only to digitize flight documents or to digitize photos or to digitize negatives, there are specialty equipment pieces that are made for those formats. And when you do that in-house in order to optimize everything and all of the things you're creating, you would really need to purchase all of those. And it takes a really long time to build up that infrastructure. Most organizations can't afford that kind of infrastructure. And if you think about it, when you're also doing that beyond the equipment infrastructure, you also have to think about the personnel that need to run them. You need to think about all of that selection and preparation and digitization and quality controls that we talked about earlier. You need to think about having the proper facilities in order to have a, quote unquote, lab or appropriate place to do digitization work that does not affect the outcome. The equipment and supplies, there are one-time costs and there are ongoing costs associated, though. So if you're lucky enough to get the equipment through a grant, those are your one-time costs. But what happens over the long term with that and how do you get money to replace that? So there are startup versus ongoing costs. And then there's this idea about estimating real costs. And Ann Kenney from Cornell University did a really fantastic formula years ago when it's actually cited in the resources section here. But really making you think about it, because a lot of us think about the direct out-of-pocket costs that we have, but we don't include the staff time. And all of your time is worth a lot of money. So we want to make sure that that gets rolled in. And so when you think about estimating these real costs and when you think about doing things in-house, you don't have a set price per digitized item. It's really hard because it's always going to vary based upon your staffing and your experience and the equipment you have. So that's a lot harder. You might produce something at the very beginning of your project that's going to cost you $100 an image if you really looked at the time it takes. And by the end of your project, it might be a lot lower, but you can never guarantee that. You also have limited production facilities in comparison to a vendor who might run multiple shifts in order to get the work done. And I think this wide range of staffing experience here as the last bit is we have a lot of people that begin and we all have to get up to speed and it takes us a lot longer at the beginning. And we've all experienced having our staff members leave and either move on or take other positions and then you have to stop and retrain somebody. And this really affects in-house work. But there are also advantages to outsourcing that I want to talk about. So we're going to turn, take those same disadvantages of in-house and move the advantages of outsourcing. You can get a lot of different services from them. You can pick and choose. You can do one. You can do three different services, whatever you want to do. When you choose to work with a vendor, and in this case I'm also going to say service provider because the case is also true in these collaborative partners that I was telling you about and hope that you will see, the technical infrastructure and the money to buy that equipment and is up to the service provider to fund and fund on an ongoing basis. It removes you of that responsibility. You also get a quote for a set price per digitized item. This is very, very important when you're going out to a granting agency or a funding agency and you're telling them you need a certain amount of money to do a certain amount of work. You can be confident when you're working with a vendor or a service provider because you contract with them for that price. So you really can generally get more out at a set price. They have that volume and throughput. They have lower staff costs. They have dedicated facilities. And they often have multiple shifts of people working to get things done. The issues of staffing that I talked about where people leave and you have to retrain and bring people up to speed, those all have to happen on the vendor side. And you don't have to worry about that. And they have to guarantee you that they will stay within their production schedule. So that's something, it really does all of these things together begin to limit and lower the risk you face whenever you take on digitization projects of more than a couple hundred items. And I think that's very important. But I don't also, I also want to make sure that I don't downplay the fact that there are some disadvantages. So let's run through them. You're one step away from the activity. So what happens if something's going on and you're worried about it? You're not there. You have less control over the imaging process. And often you don't find out there's a problem until the quality control point. Not all vendors, as I mentioned earlier about some of the, really some vendors get into this market, not all vendors have experience with our community needs. And this is especially true actually with some of the audio visual materials that we're seeing. We see a lot of people cropping up all over, offering what they tend to call transfer services. And there are fewer qualified vendors that can do that kind of work. So these are some of the disadvantages you, some of the advantages of working with an outsourcing firm and some of the things that you can limit risk on if you're trying to get in the house. Audio and video digitization are incredibly expensive in terms of the equipment you need to run that. Just trying to answer that one question that popped in there. One of the other things on the disadvantage is contracts have to be articulated at the beginning of the process. So if you decide to change your requirements and you want your audio done to a better bit rate where you want your images done to a higher rate, then you have to communicate that, you have to change the contract with your vendor and you have to document that in the process because that's a contract change and it may actually raise the cost of your in the contract. So those are things to be careful about. And then this last bit I think is really important to a lot of people about the transporting and handling of materials having to go to and from the site. And again, all of these things are related definitely for the vendor side, the for-profit vendor side. A few of these are actually ameliorated when you're working with partners, but you still have to convey those expectations. You're still transport handling whether you're working with either the sort of old kind or the traditional kind of vendor or whether you're working with the newer one. So if we think here then, what are the bottom line reasons to outsource and why should we do that? And I think this is really eloquently captured by Roy Tennant, a former colleague of mine. And this was way back in 1999. It's just a little blurb that he wrote up in library journal, but he basically said there were three basic reasons. There's expense, there's expertise, and there's time. You can generally reduce the cost of digitization and maybe some of the other activities if you choose outsourcing. You gain expertise at these specialty vendors. And again, this is gonna be very true in any sort of digital photography. Digital photography is very, very, very different than working with a scanner. And you definitely have to have the photographer's eye. And even when you're working with scanner, there's things you can train, but there's a lot of color management that people need to know. And that expertise lives in these activities. Audio and video are another layer of complexity on top of that. And you gain that expertise when you work with a vendor. You don't have to build it in-house. And then the last bit is time. When you're working at your own organization, you have to build in all this ramp up time. And there are a lot of things that need to be built into that. And with a vendor, you can jump right to it, at least in terms of they're ready to go, they have the experience in-house, they have the equipment in-house. So the only way that we're gonna be able to work on this and if we think about this is thinking about those keys, what will help you? And the idea is you really need to know your project from the very beginning, very well. And especially what your desired outputs are. There are a lot of conversations about this, but if you have very high technical specifications, it's going to be a lot easier to go with vendors who can provide ranges of service and those very, very high, meet those very high technical specifications because they have that high level equipment. And most of the consumer or prosumer, which is that professional and consumer mixed line, most of those pieces of equipment cannot do what you need if you purchase them in-house. You really need that higher level. So knowing your materials well and being able to communicate what your issues are and how you want to do them, what are your outputs there? And so when you're beginning to look for partners, that's something else we'll talk about because they do have differences from vendors, but we wanna talk about locating potential vendors as well, that's a little bit different. And then just here go with how do we work with them? So if you're looking for collaborative opportunities, and again, I tried to lay this on thickly at the beginning here, but when you're talking about collaborative opportunities, the first thing to do is to call your state organization. And a lot of these are mixed organizations. And so I've just sort of put a generic line here. But at last count, at least 32 states had collaborative digitization programs that have some level of funding, potentially some level of advice and or staffing. They may provide some level of digitization services. They can provide metadata assistance, content hosting, and some of the state-based organizations even have pieces in place that would provide for the preservation of the digital files. So it's really, really important to think about these collaborative opportunities as a first line in terms of outsourcing. You might also though think about large organizations in your area that would want to work with you. And again, this idea of the Boston Public Library and how they're helping other organizations because they've just become a regional scan center and they will do work at cost rather than at market price. So those are other things to think about in these regional digitization centers. Beyond the state-based collaborative. And then also know what the requirements are to work with them. And this is also a really important thing. I don't want to make you feel like that you would be able to just say, okay, here I am and I would like your funding and digitize these to my specifications and not honestly believe that they won't want to host your content or have copies of your content as a part of the greater state-based content or something like that. So this is in the state-based collaborative, this would be true. They may also want to hold things to a higher standard, more in-depth metadata standard than you would plan to use. They may not be able to meet the schedule that you want. And so I think these things are really important things to think about because you need to figure out what their needs are and how you can work together. It's a compromise when you're working with them. In terms of vendors, there are some really quick and easy ways to do this and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here. The best thing to do is to call a colleague or somebody who's worked on the same kind of project or somebody who is at a like-sized organization or somebody who's doing a similar kind of project. The other thing you can do is you can read the final grant report projects or final reports from grant projects that are available out there and you can just do a generic web search engine search for that and it'll tell you about their experiences, what they did and it'll generally cite who they used, if they used either some kind of service provider or who they worked with in terms of collaborating with partner organizations. And I think the last thing, and this is just a really kind of last up, is AIM, the Association for Information and Image Management, is the trade organization for these kinds of service providers other than, and I'm gonna pull this back other than for audio and video, though many of them are a part of AIM because it's related to some of the activities. So think about them as well, you can go to their website, you can search for the kind of vendors and in fact I found when I was double checking I found many of the vendors on my earlier slide there. There are lots of publications including earlier ones that I wrote that talk about these very formal processes called requests for information, requests for quotes and requests for proposals. Those are all discussed in the publication and I don't wanna spend a lot of time on them here but the important thing to think here is they're very time consuming, they're very good to use but they are very time consuming in the process. So you really only wanna use these for larger complex projects or maybe one where your particular organization requires that you get proposals and bidders and a minimum number in order to do your project. When you get to the contract thing and again there's a lot more information here in the publication and really hard things you should look for within the contract but these are key things to consider because I've seen them happen and I've seen especially small organizations get burned on these. Is subcontracting allowed? A lot of times you'll get a bid from a very large vendor who can't for example do some of the film based digitization or they can do audio but they don't have the best equipment to do video or vice versa and so they will subcontract that out unless you say otherwise and that again removes you one further step from the digitization and you have to figure out who's ultimately responsible when there are things missing. I see you over here talking about a vendor that neglected to digitize a file. So you have to think about these things and how that chain of responsibility occurs. You also want to make very very clear when you're working with vendors in general whether you have a full-blown contract or not that this is a work for hire. We have different copyright laws related to digital objects and republishing quote unquote and we have experienced vendors that have tried to claim a copy and be able to try to sell things later on down the line. So as long as you have that special phrase in there this is a work for hire they are forbidden from doing so. You always want to have your technical specifications in there and also there are many many examples of these contracts out here and I cite some in the written publication. Thinking about work schedules and deadlines and penalties how about this error correction thing that we just talked about? So who's gonna pay? Who is responsible when you notice an error? And what happens if you notice an error six months later? Who pays at that point? And these are things that are usually clearly delineated and you give yourself time to do this. It's very very important when you start working with them that you keep this regular communication. We have our mass digitization project through lyricists. We're working with 170 different member institutions through seven different digitization centers and this involves text-based, book-based I should say. It involves archival materials and it involves audio and video. And we have bi-monthly calls with every single vendor minimally and just to keep in contact and to see how things are going. And the last bit I would say is just a reminder to stay on schedule because oftentimes if you run behind, the vendor is counting on your work and if your work isn't there then they are unable to meet their other deadlines and they may not be able to squeeze it in for you at the end if you have a problem with timing or they may raise prices. So these are really important things to think about in terms of a vendor relationship. So just to kind of wrap things up in terms of this and again this is a lighter presentation of what's in the documentation here but always make sure that when you're, if you're going to seek outsourcing services please remember to seek advice from your colleagues and I think this is a fantastic way to do it and people introducing themself here and realizing that there are similar organizations and you can refer back to and get names highly encourage that. And I also want to keep encouraging you at this point to really think about outsourcing as a way to leverage existing and also better infrastructure where possible. It's out there and I know there are, as I mentioned earlier or a hinted earlier, there are a lot of conversations out there about whether every organization needs to have $100 or a $300 scanner and more and more we've heard from the funding agencies that are participating that they don't want us to happen. They've invested a lot of time and money in helping build these regional centers of expertise and regional scan centers, a lot of which are not for profit and partner or collaborative based and so they want you to use those. So this is sort of my hint for my colleagues but I should say this. Always look to those partnerships and collaborative opportunities first. Larger institutions will often help smaller institutions at cost or even sometimes do things for free. The Library Services and Technology Act or LSTA money is often made available to state-based or is made available to state-based organizations and many of them choose to spend that on their digital collaboratives. Look there is a source of funding or at least of the services to do this. If you know your project very well, you'll be able to outsource successfully and without a problem. There are so many resources out there available to you and I have them on the next slide but make sure you really understand your goals, and goals in terms of for the project but also for that end product that I talked about earlier. If you know those, you can communicate them well with any partner or vendor and you can easily have success. There shouldn't be large pitfalls. There may be small bumps in the road as they are working with anybody but these are important things to think about and they really will help you in terms of saving the expense, leveraging the expertise and cutting down on the time that it'll take you to do these kinds of digitization projects and enable you to move on to others I would say more efficiently and more economically. So the last slide here and you will have access to these slides at the end is talking about the resources arm here and you have them, you can see the things here as well as that first line there is the new publication and it's the one that also made available to you earlier. I think also if you wanna help me with questions here, I see some that you have in the parking lot and I'm sorry I ran longer than I thought but do we just wanna take these in order? Yeah, I think that was great. Well first I was thinking Linda Serigal from College Park, Maryland asked a question and I think about specifically audio visual materials and I was wondering if maybe she could while we address another question type in what those questions were into the text box there but the first one I think was from David Dexter from Wisconsin asking is there a guideline or template on recording metadata that will mesh with others? Really, really good question here and it really depends upon the kind of content that you're working with. So I would say if you're working with image-based content certainly and even continuing to be book-based content, the higher level documentation, something like Dublin Core is what almost everybody is using and I've worked with a lot of different organizations here because it's the minimum level that people need to find and work with and it can also be enhanced and you can add a lot of data to it. The Digital Public Library of America, I'm on the content and scope convening committee for that and that's one of the things that we've established that that's the minimum standard, we're not going with anything higher. A lot of organizations as I mentioned earlier might have higher standards and you'd need and there are so many out there so you would need to work with them and figure that out. In terms of other kinds of metadata even for audio and video, there are recommendations out there for the kinds of data that need to be recorded and if anybody wants that information, I can actually provide pointers to that in email if that would help. All right, thank you. Okay, so we haven't heard back about the specific questions about audio-visual materials. I want to encourage our audience, we have about 10 minutes left so if you have any questions that you would have for Rob and if you can put them in there now, that would be great. Let's see here. Leslie just wrote basic size guidelines for digitizing images that will be used in multiple ways, catalog versus website. So Leslie, if you could just clarify for me, when you say catalog, do you mean print it out and put in a catalog, high resolution printing or do you just mean thumbnail kind of images that you would use next to your integrated library system? Okay, that's what I thought. So she was saying the printed catalog. So this is actually a really, really good example of know what you want to do with that end product. And so if your end product is going to be at the highest end, you're going to need to have it in printable and of a resolution that it will print easy in catalogs, that is your specification that you're pointing to in digitization. Because the thing about digitization is, and we encourage this in the community, there's a little bit of debate on this, but you do it to minimally to the level you need and you think about doing it to the best level you can afford. And I don't mean crazy high specifications, but if you know there's a chance that you will need to include a photo, a digital image in a catalog, then you want to be able to make sure that your specifications get that. Once you have that high resolution image, you can create whatever derivative you want from that, essentially copying and saving down is the easiest way to think about it. Vendors can do this for you. There are a variety of very easy to use anything from GIMP, which is G-I-M-P. It's a free online image management software that a lot of organizations have gone to. There's also Adobe Photoshop, kind of the grandfather of programs that can help you create those low resolution images that you would want to use on your website. And Ken Radford there in Idaho, yes, we are going to be providing access to the presentation and to the leveraging document that you mentioned earlier. And if I can just double back for a minute. And so when Leslie was talking about printed, I also do want to touch on the audio because you have issues in audio conversion and also video with what you want to do with that. So if your target is to be able to re-release something, and a lot of times that's happening when people for certain projects are working on that and I early on had worked with some of the recording studios on the kinds of specifications they should use. If that's their highest quality they need to have, again, that's what they're targeting. And they can release all sorts of different versions and streaming versions and things like that. But they also want to make sure that they have a much higher level of audio quality for whatever their highest need is going to be. So it's similar. Obviously the specifications differ, but the principle is the same in there. And Alexander mentioned that the Library of Congress publishes recommendations for most types of digitization. They do. They have a lot of requests for proposals that are older but are still very valid. Their point of view is from access that they digitize to a certain level of access. There's also a new work out and it's the federal guidelines for digitization initiative. And they call it BADGI, depending on how people pronounce it. But essentially it's a bunch of federal organizations getting together and agreeing upon the standards they will use for digitization of print, photos, audio, video, basic metadata. Again, all of these things are available, freely available. And so if you search federal guidelines, digitization on the web, you will come up with their really fantastic website that has those standards they're building. The American Library Association is also putting together, through the Preservation Reformatting section, a new guideline document that really says, look, there are hundreds of specifications out there and how do I know which one to use. And they're putting together a little recommendation document saying, if you're doing this kind of thing and this is your expected output, use this guideline right here, which means this. And they're the ones that are more popular and have sort of floated to the top in terms of all of the specifications that have been published about certain kinds of original items. Other questions? You should say, I've been through, so a lot of this that I've been talking about, before I started working for lyricists, I used to work for both libraries and also another kind of organization. And so this is really based on working with vendors. And with lyricists, I now work directly with vendors on behalf of our members. And so mainly, this is a lot about how to help you and think about working with vendors, saving money, really working with those new collaborative organizations, but trying to save you some of the pain that other people have gone through. Because for the most part, I've experienced all of these things that have been through, including the part of vendors wanting to do things with your objects or trying to build an in-house facility that just wasn't worth it in the long run. Did you, Francesca, have a question there? She says, I work at an art museum when we are trying to streamline the digitization of our collection images at the same time as we color correct the images. Do you have any recommendations for working with companies in color correcting the digitized images against the original artworks on site? That is a fantastic question. And I have to admit that I don't know of any companies that actually will work in that color management. But what I can do is my colleague heavily with museums and actually used to work in museums and I would be more than happy to ask her and then have, else if it's possible, to kind of just a little follow up in there and I would be happy to do that. I mean, obviously, you add a complication when you would need them to be able to compare it to what's on site. So now you're asking vendors, and this is absolutely a possibility, to instead of send your content out to bring them in. And that brings up all sorts of organizational challenges sometimes, but it's absolutely possible. And I would be happy to collect names and or at least one for you and make that information available to you. That would help. So Francesca, if you check, I'll post what I see on the recording page, this is Elsa. Nancy, I'm also thinking from Florida. If I remember correctly, this is a newer museum and I think we might have been in contact with you recently about some of the work you have regarding a potential disaster response. So if that's the case, please let us know if we can help you in that way too, but I don't know if digitization of that content is in the works after the fact and we could talk more about how to prepare and work with those materials if they've gotten wet in the meantime. We have a question now from Alexander. Preve, do you see that? I've been recently exploring OCR technology for historic records. Do you have any recommendations for vendors that specialize in that? Ooh, very, very good question. So they used to have this fabulous competition every year put on by a university to do both printed documents and trying then to get into text. And unfortunately, they've stopped doing that. So we don't have a widely known objective base for coming up with this information. Honestly, most of the people that I know that are working with historic records, and in this case, I'm thinking you're qualifying meaning historic records that are not printed. But if I'm incorrect, please let me know. Most people these days are using, instead of doing OCR, they're actually having people key in or double key systems. A lot of people are leveraging volunteers to do this. In fact, our own archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, has quite a successful program going on at the National Archives and Records Administration because there are more programs out there that help you have multiple people type in and detect differences in what they've typed in than there are better programs that can detect handwriting and try to convert that well. I know that sounds odd, but that seems to be the way it is right now. But again, I'm also happy to see. I have a few people that I know of that are working exclusively with handwritten documents, and I would be happy to see if I could find the name of somebody or the name of a program that's doing that, if that would be helpful. OK, great. I think we have time for one or two more questions. And in the meantime, I'm going to pull over a box that has a link to an evaluation. It's about eight questions long, and we pay a lot of attention to your responses to these evaluations. So if you could take just a minute or two after we sign off here to fill that out, we'd really appreciate it. Let's see here. Do we have another question for you? It looks like he's working with historic correspondence, and that's what I'm guessing it's handwritten. And as I said, from the people that I've spoken to and colleagues that I have at NARA, it has been so challenging that it was easier to develop a program that would, as I said, check multiple keying in by different volunteers or different staff members. And actually, a lot of this gets offshoreed with photocopies, and they have, shall we say, lower cost rates for doing this kind of work. And so a lot of people have been working on that because the computer can catch the difference in what people are typing, but they just can't manage all the different styles of handwriting. Makes sense. So Leslie is pointing out just something that I was saying. It's very hard. I think color correction is, and again, this is one of those things you would leave if you're not in the museum yourself. You would have to have somebody come in and just be an expert in this. This is not something that people can be up to speed on quickly. I guess my other question, and one color correction in terms of it, is a lot of people, we used to recommend all the time that people would put color bars into the image in places that could be automatically cropped out. I'm not sure if that's the kind of color correction that you would be working with, or you can see whether they're shift or whether it's looking at the original and trying to actually work with image correction programs to bring back what it might have looked like at the time of creation. And that ladder is an absolute whole specialty and expertise that we don't see a lot of in our community. OK, well, we've hit the hour mark, so I think we should wrap it up. There is a space to carry on further discussions on the online community, both in the group discussion boards, and also there are places that you can put in questions and follow up under the recording, which I should have posted by the end of the day tomorrow and hopefully a little bit sooner. And in the meantime, I did want to remember to plug our next webinar that's going to be on Wednesday, April 18 at 1 PM Eastern. It's going to be called May Day, Create a Game Plan, and we're going to be joined by Lori Foley, who's the vice president for emergency programs here at Heritage Preservation. We should also have our schedule up of the next live chats through July, and that will be posted in the next couple of days, both on the home page. And I will be sending out an email to everybody that's in the community about that. So I think that's it. I hope everybody will take just a minute to file that evaluation survey. And OK, let's see. Ken Radford asked, before you go, what you advise is how to get notes for today's lecture. My concern is OCR for printed media and correction techniques. I'm not sure if I'm understanding if you're asking about the presentation that you've just seen, the PowerPoint presentation, or any of the other backup resources. We will have those posted on the Connecting to Collections website. But if I'm not answering your question, then please type in there. Or if you have specific questions and you're hoping that we can find other resources for you, certainly we'd be happy to try to locate those and share them. OK, but in the meantime, Robin, thank you so much for your time and for the presentation and for all your answers. I'm sure that everybody found that very helpful. The recording will be posted, and it can be shared with your colleagues too. Everybody would find that helpful. Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me to be with people today. OK, and thanks for your questions, everybody. All right, everybody have a wonderful afternoon.