Building Digital Archives with Minimal Staffing: Metadata

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

5-14-2025

Keywords

Digitization, Archives, Special Collections

Abstract

Digitization can help bring your archival materials to life by making them accessible and easy to use in a variety of projects and settings. There are many reasons to start digitizing your institution’s holdings, and likely just as many stakeholders who want an institution's archival materials digitized. If you do not have a digitization department, this work can seem daunting—even if you do have a digitization department, you might have good reasons to supplement their output. This webinar covered getting started on digitization projects in the archives when you do not have many resources.

Sessions included information on equipment recommendations, digitization workflows, metadata, and platforms and tools for managing, accessing, and working with digitized or born digital materials. During the webinar, presenters discussed advocating for resources, project planning, and documentation, along with demonstrations.

This session included a basic overview of metadata elements; what minimal metadata can look like; a discussion of providing access as opposed to perfection in item-level description, and digital rights statements.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

This session was part of the two-day webinar Building Digital Archives With Minimal Staffing, organized on behalf of the CARLI Archives Taskforce by Rebecca Fitzsimmons, Ashley Howdeshell, and Marcella Lees.

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