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Digitization Guidelines Initiative

Still Image Working Group: Working Group Charter | Sub-Groups | Advisory Board | Meeting Notes

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Still Image Working Group

This group is involved in a cooperative effort to develop common digitization guidelines for historical and cultural materials that can be reproduced as still images, such as textual content, maps, photographic prints and negatives. The overall goal is to enhance the exchange of research results and development, encourage collaborative digitization practices and projects among federal agencies, and provide the public with a product of uniform quality. It will also serve to establish a common set of benchmarks for digitization service providers and manufacturers.  In addition to digital imaging and encoding, guidelines will be developed for the metadata that is embedded in digital image files.

Working Group Goals:

Primary considerations in the development of specific guidelines will be:

  • Defined categories and characteristics of content to be digitally represented
  • Defined objectives and specifications for the digital masters by category
  • Common image performance measures and methods of validating those measures to defined requirements

Expected Deliverables:

  • Definitions of digitization objectives
  • Standard classifications of content types
  • A foundational model describing imaging quality/performance characteristics and metrics
  • Technical and process definitions
  • Published draft and final digitization guidelines within the scope of this charter
  • Published conceptual framework for the digitization process
  • Development of a public web site to communicate the Working Group’s activities including the posting of draft and final guidelines.

Current Guidelines

Learn about the Audio-Visual Working Group

The goal for this working group is to identify, establish, and disseminate information about standards and practices for the digital reformatting of audio-visual materials by federal agencies.

Learn more

Last Updated: 12/28/2012