Digitization: What I Thought I Knew—and What I Learned
When I walked into Clemson Libraries’ Digitization Lab, I honestly thought digitization was simple. In my mind, it was just a big camera, a quick click, and done. Easy, right? Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Before the lab visit, I went through Cornell’s https://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/ tutorial and watched the Library of Congress video https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/. Both made it clear that digitization isn’t just “taking a picture.” It’s about creating a digital copy that’s accurate enough to stand in for the original—color, detail, everything. That means resolution, lighting, calibration, and a whole lot of technical know-how.
Seeing it in person with Kelly Riddle, our Director of Digitization and Digital Projects, really drove it home. I was shocked at how long it takes to digitize even a simple page. And those cameras? They’re not just point-and-shoot. Kelly explained that the settings have to be recalibrated every single morning because even humidity can affect the sensitive lens. For projects like the National Park Service grant, there are strict https://planning.dc.gov/publication/nps-electronic-format-standards—and if those aren’t met, the image has to be redone. No shortcuts.
It made me think about my own work with metadata. For years, I’ve worked on metadata after the image is created—never during digitization. My experience started with historical Clemson photos, where I spent hours digging through Taps yearbooks to identify faces. Sometimes I’d find the exact photo, sometimes not. Later, I moved into cataloging rare and very old books, which is just as tedious in its own way. Metadata creation is slow, detailed work, and often involves building localized vocabularies for people and places as we identify them.
Right now, metadata and images live in separate worlds. The images are stored in numbered boxes, while metadata goes into CollectiveAccess. We match them by ID numbers, but they’re not bundled together. I’ve been told this workflow isn’t efficient—and I agree. We need a way to connect images and metadata into a single package. That would require new software capable of handling both. Clemson’s Collections Discovery department is actively working on new workflows, and there’s talk of a shared platform for Archives, Special Collections, and the Digitization Lab. At first, I thought that sounded overly complicated. Now, after seeing the digitization process up close, I understand why it’s necessary. A unified system would make collaboration smoother and ensure that the digital object and its metadata stay together.
What direction will this take us? I’m not sure yet. But I do know this: digitization isn’t fast, and it’s definitely not simple. It’s photography, metadata, compliance, and research—all working together. And I hope I get to work with historical images again. I miss that part a lot.
Walking out of the lab, I realized digitization isn’t just about creating access; it’s about creating trust in the digital record. And that trust takes time, skill, and a lot of patience. We made need to work to other technologies.
