Conclusion

The digitisation process is a very complicated one. However, if you establish all your requirements before you start it can be achieved to everyone's satisfaction.

Consider the following points:

• Establish aims for digitisation. It's one thing to want the work digitised, but many people don't consider how to use the digital images until the digitisation is done.
• Find out curators requirements - for handling/study and produce condition reports on the materials before proceeding with digitisation and plan the digitisation according to these criteria.
• Staff requirements - establish roles for all staff and ensure people are thoroughly trained in their roles.
• Equipment setup - set up everything before you bring out the book.
• Handling, tools and equipment - practice and refine your processes on dummy materials before embarking on the real thing. Mistakes made on 'lesser' books can be invaluable learning tools for the real thing. Have all tools ready before you start and maintain them in good condition.
• Room environment - consider the environment you both digitise and check images in. A dirty room produces dirty scans. Consider the impact the colour of your room has on your quality control.
• IT requirements for capture, quality control and storage - Can your workspace handle the workflow. Digital imaging requires powerful computers and huge amounts of disk space. Having many ongoing jobs can create problems with storage.

Take every and all efforts to minimise the risk during capture process:

• from store to scanner
• during book positioning
• during page turning
• from scanner to store

Develop a firm plan for Quality control and IT storage.

Ensure that your client/curator are happy with all procedures before scanning starts, during the early stages and have them check the images early to ensure satisfaction. We demonstrated our procedures with 'dummy' books to the client/curator to ensure that they were happy with us proceeding on the 'real thing'.

Return the volume under controlled transport once the client has reviewed all the images thoroughly.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been achieved without the gracious help of the following people and organisations:

Auckland City Library - Theresa Graham, Alison Dobbie; the National Digital Forum; Marion Mehrtens; David Ashman and Triptych Conservation Services; National Library of New Zealand - Jocelyn Chalmers, David Adams, Mark Strange; New Zealand Micrographic Services Ltd - Andrew Fenton; Desktop Imaging Ltd - Braden Rowe; New Zealand Electronic Text Centre - Elizabeth Styron; the Western States Digital Standards Group; Cruse Digital Scanners.