Project Planning: IMPACT Best Practice Guide

Digitisation projects take in expertise from a wide variety of institutional sources, from subject curators and preservation staff, hardware and software specialists, to experts in intellectual property law. Depending on the physical capacity of the institution and the size and type of the collections to be digitised, the process may involve external contractors at any stage. For these reasons, institutions intending digitisation should establish a specific planning and approval process that sets out the operational context in which any digitisation is to be done, the baseline technical standards to be applied, the preferred business model(s) to be used in the eventual delivery of the digitised material, and the final storage of the digital objects produced. A consistent planning and approval model will make the scope of individual projects easier to define, and thereby aid any negotiations with internal stakeholders and external parties.