Value

The value of the materials’ content and the benefits derived from access to digital versions justify the expenditure of time and effort of carrying out a digitization project. The content should have sufficient intrinsic value to ensure ongoing use by a defined constituency for a significant period of time.

Many factors contribute, but they include:

• intellectual content;
• historical significance⁷;
• rarity;
• importance for the understanding of the relevant subject area;
• broad or deep coverage of the relevant subject area;
• useful and accurate content;
• information on subjects or groups that are otherwise poorly documented;
• access to the material currently restricted due to its condition, value, vulnerability or location.

Demand

To justify the effort and expense, there should be a reasonable expectation that the product will have immediate utility for New Zealanders community and/or other appropriate audiences. Thus factors to be considered might include:

• an active, current audience for the materials;
• advocacy for the project from part of the community;
• realistic expectation of attracting new users even if current use is low;
• requests from potential partners in collaborative or consortial efforts.

Note however that that a 2005 paper looking at 21 digitisation projects for historical photograph collections cautions against using existing demand as the sole justification for digitisation:

“Criteria for selection are often made on the perceived needs of the targeted viewer. Hence there is a danger of producing a ‘turn-of-the-century view’ shaped, as one archivist interviewee put it, by ‘today’s trends for nostalgia’ rather than by online resources that will have sustainability over time. …The question here .. is one of authenticity and representation of historical material being accessed by the public”⁸

Non-Duplication

There is no identical or similar digital resource that can reasonably meet the expressed needs.

Collaborative Potential

The following factors could be considered:

• part of a collection split among a number of institutions that could be united online as a virtual collection;
• contribution to development of a "critical mass" of digital materials in a subject area;
• flexible integration and synthesis of a variety of formats, or of related materials scattered among many locations.

Enhancement of intellectual access

The following factors could be considered:

• enhancement of intellectual control through creation of new finding aids, links to bibliographic records, and development of indices and other tools;
• ability to search widely, manipulate images and text, and study disparate images in new contexts;
• widespread dissemination of local or unique collections.

Enhancement of resource quality

Improved quality of access to resource content, e.g., through improved legibility of faded or stained documents, enhanced images or restored sound quality through digitisation processes.

Preservation

While digitization does not in itself constitute preservation, there are preservation aspects to be considered through the creation of digital surrogates will allow:

• significant reduction in handling of fragile materials;
• access to materials that cannot otherwise be easily used;
• protection of materials at high risk of theft or mutilation.

Technical Feasibility

Potential projects should be evaluated as to whether it is technically possible with current equipment and software to capture, present, and store digital resources in ways that meet user needs.

Considerations include:

• degree to which a digital version can represent the full content of the original;
• understanding of how people will use the digital versions and the level of quality that that implies;
• whether the materials will display well digitally;
• anticipation of future users with better equipment, to avoid a need to rescan in a few years;
• staff and resources to support programming, user interface design, and search engine development to assure that the project can fulfil the functions for which digitization is planned;
• long term storage requirements.

Materials that require special consideration include:

• materials that require unusually high resolution;
• materials for which fidelity to original colour is essential;
• oversize items;
• items with poor legibility;
• material with a complex graphic layout intertwined with text.

Intellectual Control Criteria

Potential projects should be evaluated as to whether appropriate intellectual control can be provided for the original materials and the digital versions:

• cataloguing, processing and related organizational work already accomplished or to be accomplished as part of the project;
• staff and resources to support creation of appropriate metadata relating to document identification, technical capture information, provenance, and easy navigation within the information resource;
• accordance with the provisions of the 1994 Copyright Act and any amendments to it.

Consideration of special requirements around traditional knowledge

“Although digitization is ideal for sharing, exchanging, educating and preserving indigenous cultures, it also creates ample opportunities for illicit access to and misuse of traditional knowledge. It is essential that traditional owners be able to define and control the rights and access to their resources, in order to uphold traditional laws; prevent the misuse of indigenous heritage in culturally inappropriate or insensitive ways; and receive proper compensation for their cultural and intellectual property. Finally, it is essential that indigenous communities be able to describe and contextualize their culturally and historically significant collections in their own words and from their own perspectives.”

J. Hunter, B. Koopman, J. Sledge, “Software Tools for Indigenous Knowledge Management”, Museums and the Web 2003

“A cornerstone of an Indigenous Digital Library is that the indigenous communities themselves control the rights management of their cultural intellectual property. Local cultural protocols need to be documented and followed prior to the creation of digital content, and communities must be consulted with regard to the digitization of content already gathered by institutions of social memory.”

Robert Sullivan, “Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights”, D-Lib May 2002