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This group is involved in a cooperative effort to develop common digitization guidelines for still image materials (such as textual content, maps, photographic prints and negatives). The expectation is that this work will enhance the exchange of research results and developments, encourage collaborative digitization practices and projects among federal agencies and institutions and provide the public with a product of uniform quality. It will also serve to set uniform quality and establish a common set of benchmarks for digitization service providers and manufacturers.
The work will focus on guidelines intended for works categorized as historical, cultural and/or archival. In addition to digital imaging and encoding, guidelines will be developed for the metadata that is embedded in digital image files, with a view to increasing the extent to which the files can be “self-describing.”
Primary considerations in the development of specific guidelines will be:
- Defined objectives for the digital object being produced
- Defined categories and characteristics of content to digitally represented
- Common image performance measures and methods of validating those measures to defined requirements
Expected Deliverables
- Definitions of digitization objectives
- Standard classifications of content types
- A foundational model describing imaging quality/performance characteristics and metrics
- Technical and process definitions
- Published draft and final digitization guidelines within the scope of this charter
- Published conceptual framework for the digitization process
- Development of a public web site to communicate the activities under this charter, including the posting of draft and final guidelines
A more complete description of objectives, scope and methodology can be found in the Still Image Digitization Working Group Charter.
Current Draft Documents
The following draft documents are currently under review, and final drafts will be posted here soon.
TIFF Image Metadata
(Comment period closed on 11/15/08)
Digital Imaging Framework
(Comment period closed on 11/15/08)
News & Events
Michael Stelmach and Carl Fleischhauer discuss this initiative in a Federal News Radio interview (mp3 file) October 16, 2008
Carl Fleischhauer is interviewed for an article in Government Video October 1, 2008
See all News and Events
Last Updated: 11/26/2008