The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow and the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/ For HATII Seamus Ross Ian Anderson Celia Duffy Maria Economou Ann Gow Peter McKinney Rebecca Sharp For NINCH, 2002 President: Samuel Sachs II President-Elect: Charles Henry Executive Director: David L. Green NINCH Working Group on Best Practices Chair: David L. Green Kathe Albrecht Morgan Cundiff LeeEllen Friedland* Peter Hirtle Lorna Hughes Katherine Jones Mark Kornbluh Joan Lippincott Michael Neuman Richard Rinehart Thornton Staples Jennifer Trant** * through June 2001 ** through May 1999 Copyright ã 2002-2003, National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage Version 1.0 of the First Edition, published October 2002 Version 1.1 of the First Edition, published February 2003 The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements i I. Introduction 1 II. Project Planning 9 III. Selecting Materials: An Iterative Process 38 IV. Rights Management 61 V. Digitization and Encoding of Text 84 VI. Capture and Management of Images 102 VII. Audio/Video Capture and Management 120 VIII. Quality Control and Assurance 142 IX. Working With Others 152 X. Distribution 162 XI. Sustainability: Models for Long-Term Funding 171 XII. Assessment of Projects by User Evaluation 179 XIII. Digital Asset Management 189 XIV. Preservation 198 Appendix A: Equipment 214 Appendix B: Metadata 222 Appendix C: Digital Data Capture: Sampling 227 References 231 Abbreviations Used in the Guide 234 Preface and Acknowledgements I am delighted to introduce the First Edition of the NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials. Since the Guide was first imagined and seriously discussed in 1998, much committed thought, imagination and expertise have gone into the project. Back then it was clear that high-level guidance was needed (engaging multiple perspectives across different institution types and formats) to make sense of the plethora of materials coming out on information and technical standards, metadata, imaging, project management, digital asset management, sustainability, preservation strategies, and more. NINCH had been created in 1996 to be an advocate and leader across the cultural heritage community in making our material universally accessible via the new digital medium and this project seemed tailor-made for our new coalition. Following NINCH’s own good practice, the NINCH Board organized a working group to consider the best ways to proceed. That group is at the core of this project. We have lost and gained a few members along the way, but they are the Guide’s heroes. Let me name them: Kathe Albrecht (American University), Morgan Cundiff (Library of Congress), LeeEllen Friedland (The MITRE Corporation, formerly Library of Congress), Peter Hirtle (Cornell University), Lorna Hughes (New York University), Katherine Jones (Harvard Divinity School), Mark Kornbluh (Michigan State University), Joan Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information), Michael Neuman (Georgetown University), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, University of California, Berkeley), Thornton Staples (University of Virginia) and Jennifer Trant (AMICO). Archivists, librarians, scholars and teachers, digitization practitioners, visual resource experts, museum administrators, audio and moving-image engineers, information technologists, pioneers and entrepreneurs: all were represented in this group. Their expertise, good humor, persistence and good judgment have been essential to our producing this material. After defining the project and declaring our core principles (detailed in the Introduction), the Working Group issued a Request for Proposals to conduct research into the state of current practice and to write the Guide in close collaboration with the Working Group. Of the several fine proposals submitted, we selected one from a broad and experienced team from the University of Glasgow. Under the leadership of Seamus Ross, a research team, based at Glasgow’s Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), mapped out an ambitious survey of the field for gathering information about current practice in the selection, planning, digitization, management and preservation of cultural heritage materials. We thank them for their work. Although the Guide is the heart of this resource, the online version (http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/) includes a general bibliography compiled by HATII together with the reports on the 36 interviews that formed the chief i armature of the research underlying the Guide. I want to thank the 68 practitioners who offered us their experience and wisdom. With a working draft in hand, the NINCH Working Group invited a team of volunteer, expert readers to consider our product. They probed and critiqued, and added richly to the text. Let me thank Melinda Baumann (University of Virginia Library), Stephen Chapman (Harvard University Library), Barbara Berger Eden (Cornell University Library), Georgia Harper (University of Texas), Sally Hubbard (Getty Research Institute), Leslie Johnston (University of Virginia Library), Amalyah Keshet (Jerusalem Museum, Israel), Deb Lenert, (Getty Research Institute), Kama Lord (Harvard Divinity School), Alan Newman (Art Institute of Chicago), Maria Pallante (Guggenheim Foundation) and Michael Shapiro (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) for their readings and contributions. All who have read his comments would quickly agree with my singling out Steve Chapman as one who exceeded all of our expectations in the depth of his reading and the comprehensiveness of his responses. So a special thank you to you, Steve: we are indebted to you. Julia Flanders, of Brown University’s Women Writers Project, served as an inspiring copy editor, going far beyond what we might have asked of her. Lorna Hughes, Assistant Director for Humanities Computing at New York University, arranged for the generous donation of web services to mount this edition of the Guide to Good Practice on the Internet. Antje Pfannkuchen and Nicola Monat-Jacobs have done a superb job of tirelessly mounting many pre-publication versions of the text online leading up to this final First Edition: we thank them heartily for their accurate and prompt work. Meg Bellinger, Vice President, OCLC Digital & Preservation Resources, has offered the services of that division in mirroring the Guide on OCLC web sites in the U.S. and abroad and in furthering the Guide’s further development. Thanks to Robert Harriman, Tom Clareson, Judy Cobb and Amy Lytle in making that happen. Many thanks to the Getty Grant Program for initially funding this project and making it possible. For all of its richness and complexity, we propose this as the first of several editions of a living document. Future developments and discoveries will add to and refine it. What can your experience add? The Second Edition will incorporate not only your comments but also an online navigational system based on a set of decision trees that should dramatically improve access to the information and advice. Please use our Comments Form to update or correct information or suggest features that will enable us to make the Second Edition increasingly useful in assisting this broad community to network cultural resources more effectively: http://www.ninch.org/programs/practice/comments.html David Green October, 2002 ii NINCH Guide to Good Practice I. Introduction The Case for Good Practice Early developers of digital resources often had little thought for how their projects might dovetail with others. Today many of these projects suffer from this lack of forethought; they cannot be extended for broader use, they cannot be built upon by others and the chances are slim that they will survive into the future. More recently, the cultural community has begun to realize the importance of applying technical and information standards intelligently and consistently. The use of such standards not only adds longevity and scalability to the project’s life cycle, but also enables an ever widening public to discover and use its digital resources. One of the goals of this Guide to Good Practice is to show the critical importance for the community of moving beyond the narrow vision of these early project-based enthusiasts and thinking through what is needed to establish sustainable programs. By adopting community shared good practice, project designers can ensure the broadest use of their materials, today and in the future, by audiences they may not even have imagined and by future applications that will dynamically recombine ‘digital objects’ into new resources. They can ensure the quality, consistency and reliability of a project’s digital resources and make them compatible with resources from other projects and domains, building on the work of others. Such projects can be produced economically and can be maintained and managed into the future with maximum benefit for all. In short, good practice can be measured by any one project’s ability to maximize a resource’s intended usefulness while minimizing the cost of its subsequent management and use. By adopting community shared good practice, project designers can ensure the broadest use of