dec08c.indd


Jane Hedberg P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w s  

Federal digital guidelines 
The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines 
Initiative, which began in 2007, is a collab­
orative effort of a dozen federal institutions 
to develop a common set of guidelines for 
digitizing historical materials. 

The guidelines are intended to increase 
quality and consistency of digitized public 
documents, streamline workfl ows, reduce 
costs, promote collaboration and exchange 
of research across agencies, and provide 
benchmarks for service providers and manu­
facturers. 

The initiative has formed two working 
groups, one for still images and one for sound 
and moving images. 

The Federal Agencies Still Image Digiti­
zation Working Group will focus on books, 
manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints 
and negatives. The participating agencies in­
clude the Library of Congress (LC), National 
Agricultural Library (NAL), National Archives 
and Records Administration (NARA), Na­
tional Gallery of Art, the National Library 
of Medicine (NLM), National Technical In­
formation Services, National Transportation 
Library, the Smithsonian Institution, U. S. 
Geological Survey, and the U.S. Government 
Printing Offi ce (GPO). 

The Federal Agencies Audio­Visual Work­
ing Group will focus on sound recordings, 
video, and motion picture film. The partici­
pating agencies include the Defense Visual 
Information Directorate of the Department 
of Defense, LC, NAL, NARA, NLM, the 
Smithsonian Institution, GPO, and the Voice 
of America. 

The initiative opened its Web site to the 
public on September 30, 2008. The URL is 
www.digitizationguidelines.gov/. 

Jane Hedberg is preservation program offi  cer at Harvard 
University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@harvard.edu; 
fax: (617) 496-8344 

Conservation and digitization 
LIBER Quarterly, vol. 18: no. 2, contains 
“Asking the Right Questions: The Role of the 
Conservator in Digital Projects” by Jan Paris, 
conservator for special collections at Wilson 
Library at the University of North Carolina­
Chapel Hill. In the article, Paris explains how 
she determines whether vulnerable special 
collections materials can be digitized. She 
evaluates the condition of each item and the 
purpose and scale of the digitization project 
in order to weigh the risks to the item against 
the benefits to institutional goals. Once the 
decision to digitize has been made, Paris de­
termines if the material requires conservation 
pre­ or post­scanning and how the material 
should be handled safely during scanning. 
The article also includes three examples il­
lustrating her decision process. 

The full text of the article is available as 
a free PDF at liber.library.uu.nl/publish/ar­
ticles/000245/article.pdf. 

Katrina redux 
The Library of Congress has mounted online 
“Learning from Katrina: Conservators’ First­
Person Accounts of Response and Recovery; 
Suggestion for Best Practice.” After Hurricane 
Katrina in 2005, the Heritage Emergency 
Assistance Recovery Teams (HEART) As­
sessment Program sent two mobile units to 
assess damage to cultural institutions and 
collections. In 2006, ten of the conserva­
tors who participated in the assessments 
recorded their experiences. Interviews with 
Gary Frost and Randy Silverman, Susan Duhl 
and Jill Sterrett, Kathy Ludwig and Hilary 
Kaplan, Karen Pavelka, Theresa Voellinger, 
Barbara Moore, and Lois Price are available 
online as short audio clips. 

The URL for the interviews is www.loc. 
gov/preserv/emergprep/katrinarespond. 
html. 

C&RL News December 2008  740 

mailto:jane_hedberg@harvard.edu
http:www.digitizationguidelines.gov