Major issues

Major Issues in Digitisation

The Digitisation Working Group is identifying major issues in digitisation which need to be tackled. Decisions still need to be made on how best to tackle these issues.

Long-term Curation of Digital Objects

This issue includes the following elements:

• Annotations.
• Curation of workflows.
• Maintaining a collection that has been partially or fully digitised along with the physical collection.
• Curation of born digital objects.
• ICT issues involved in digital curation may be outside the scope (eg storage) although decision-making in this area was often being tasked to the digitisation curator and we may need to consider how we aim to come up with best practice for our area.
• Items not linked to Natural History collections were considered outside the scope.
• Internal curation workflows – our physical objects change over time so how do we maintain the digital version?
• Updating the physical specimens if the digital record changes.
• Correcting geographic data on the specimen – could be done when the specimen is being handled for other purposes.

Relevant literature and websites:

Digital Curation Centre