Outsourcing: IMPACT Best Practice Guide

Museums, Libraries and Archives have been digitising their collections for more than twenty years, but industrial digitisation – the conversion of millions of information resources into digital form – is still a relatively young field. For that reason, many institutions lack the internal knowledge or physical resources to manage large-scale digitisation projects without outside assistance. Depending on an institution’s internal capacity and policies, a digitisation project may require third-party input at any stage of its workflow: from initial image capture and storage, to metadata creation and quality assurance of project outputs. In such cases, outsourcing services or tasks to a third-party can be greatly beneficial in terms of scoping, managing and costing a digitisation project from beginning to end. While outsourcing may deliver a more streamlined and cost-effective workflow, such collaboration can also bring potential complications: for instance, the necessity of defining the legal ownership of the resulting work, the possible use of proprietary software in creating the image files and metadata (which may limit the reuse potential of project outputs), or restrictions on access for commercial reasons.