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The phrase digitazation projects refers to all organized efforts to take a body of existing materials, whether print, graphical, audio or some combination of these and translate it into digital form, that is to say, into a computer file, which can then be read, displayed, searched, transmitted and otherwise manipulated by appropriate software controlling the necessary devices. An important part of any digitization project is the description of the document in question and its attributes through the assigment of metadata, standarized coded elements which state the document’s title, author, date of production and other characterisitics which are essential for retrieval. Traditional library cataloging information is a kind of metadata, describing authorship, titles, date, publisher, place of publication, edition variant and “aboutness” denoters called subject headings.

Digitization projects are undertaken for a variety of reasons. Some are simple “proof of concept” efforts, in which an organization experiments with the creation of a digital version of some of its resources in order to determine technology effectiveness, staff requirments, through-put time and costs. Others are much more ambitious designs which aim at extending the accessibility of important document collections to a larger user base. Common to all digitzation projects is the conviction that the advent of networked information systems, particularly the World Wide Web, has launched a new era in information resource creation and dissemination, one which is world wide in nature. Some projects have a purely commercial motivation, as in the case of a publishing company’s decision to “retrodigitze” backfiles of its journals, and offer fee -based access to them. The publisher has decided that the backfiles are a business asset, previously unused, that could add to the organization’s revenue stream if made available. Other projects have a “preservationist” character, since an organization seeks to move “at risk” originals to what is thought (or hoped) to be a safer storage medium. And some are guided by a beneficent or philanthropic motive, for example, the desire to make classics of world literature or philosophy available to all, at no cost, or to make rare scholarly resources, previously to be found only in one or two locations, generally accessible to the professional community and so foster scholarship. Many governmental and philanthropic organizations see digitization of their resources as the logical next step in the pursuit of the missions assigned to them by legislation or by declaration of intention by the charity’s founders. In addition to this class of digitization project, which essentially consists in the transformation of items originally created in print or in some graphic format, there is a large and growing body of s