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Digitization Coordination at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

Kira M. Sobers

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Who We Are: SLA�

Locations

Washington, D.C.
Maryland
Virginia
New York City
Republic of Panama

Institutional Archives
21 Libraries

Art
History and Culture
Natural and Physical Sciences

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (SLA) is comprised of 21 library research centers and an institutional archive. We have locations all across the Washington, D.C. area, as well as in Maryland, Virginia, New York City, and in the Republic of Panama. Every Smithsonian museum and research center has at least one library collection within it and all museums are supported centrally by the institutional archives.

Our collections include over two million library volumes in subjects ranging from art to zoology, and more than forty-four thousand cubic feet of archival records relating to the history of the Smithsonian, everything from the creation of exhibits to the personal papers of scientists in the natural history museum. We hold materials in a variety of formats, including research journals, trade literature, rare books, manuscripts, field notes, photographs, and audiovisual materials.

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Factors in Digitization Coordination

Factor	SLA Overall
Staffing	6.5 FTE
Location	Geographically distributed collections, staff, and equipment. Restrictions on movement of rare materials.
Format	Books, loose papers, photographs, audiovisual
Condition	Triage. All rare, archival, and flagged items reviewed by conservators.

Factor	Libraries	Archives
Copyright	Mostly published works. Numerous permissions agreements with rights holders. Multiple copyright statuses.	Mostly unpublished works. Multiple copyright statuses.
Description	Item level metadata with barcodes	Collection level metadata without barcodes

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Everything that SLA has digitized so far was deemed higher priority than the things that SLA has not digitized yet.

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Prioritization Impacts

Researcher Requests
Unit Digitization Plan

Three-year plan
SLA off-cycle by a year

Informed by other unit plans

Restricted Funds

Biodiversity
Rare materials

We discovered there are a couple of key factors that impact SLA’s digitization prioritization.

One of largest is researcher requests. The nature of our collections and our user base means that we prioritize researcher requests for digitized materials over other projects. This sometimes means we have less control over what parts of the collection are being imaged.

Additionally, every three years we generate a Unit Digitization Plan for the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (you’ll hear more about them next). This plan is a place for us to identify the collections we deem digitization priorities as well as the challenges we envision in getting the work done. Shortly before this latest cycle of plans, we negotiated with DPO the ability to submit our plan a year after all other Smithsonian units. Since SLA is a supporting unit to many of the Smithsonian museums, being able to view their plans before creating our own allows us to analyze and prioritize ways that we can collaborate and support initiatives at the museums, as well as allowing us to anticipate their needs, especially for materials that directly relate to their collections. For example, this photo is a list of items collected during an expedition, and the specimens were then sent to the National Museum of Natural History.

Another major impact on prioritization is restricted funds and endowments. These are funds donated to SLA with specific conditions and intentions, such as the Atherton Seidell Endowment Fund. This restricted fund was originally dedicated to microfilming scientific literature, and was later used to support digitization of these materials. It was the Seidell Fund that purchased our original equipment, and much of the department staffing has been through the use of this fund. However, imaging staff funded by Seidell can only work on materials relating to scientific literature, which has had an obvious impact on the percentage of our materials digitized that relate to natural history compared to arts and culture. Of our 13 million digitized library pages, 10.7 million were funded by this endowment.

We have also received a number of donations over the years with the specific intention of imaging certain subsets of our rare materials. Unlike the Seidell Fund, in most cases, the donations are not large enough, or frequent enough, to fund an imaging technician dedicated to working on those items, which means we have to shift priorities to fulfill our obligation to the donor.

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SLA in BHL

The BHL Consortium guides digitization prioritization and other work across partners.
SLA serves as the headquarters for BHL
SLA has contributed:

10,700,00+ Library pages
350,000+ Archives pages

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The Role of Digitization Coordinator

Digital asset management
Conduct assessment of digital surrogate collection impact and gap analysis
Lead post-upload curation and metadata enhancement efforts
Liaison to external data partners, such as BHL
Liaison to external digitization groups, such as FADGI

Point of contact for all digitization requests
Project manager for all collection digitization
Create, curate, and manage the digitization queue
Coordinate with Cataloging, Preservation, Locations

At SLA, the role of the Digitization Coordinator not only involves making decisions on where to digitize things when, but it also requires collaboration with other departments within SLA. I need to communicate with Cataloging to make sure that materials have adequate records before imaging, as well as work with them on corrections or additions needed, such as when a book is missing pages. I work with our Preservation Team regularly as all rare and archival materials require a preservation review, and a lot of our archival materials require some level of treatment, prior to imaging. And of course, I need to communicate with staff that work where the materials are physically located in order to have items sent to one of the imaging sites.

All of this collaboration is happening just within SLA. However, as Digitization Coordinator, it is also my job to collaborate with external data partners, such as other BHL members, as well as represent SLA in external groups and committees that establish or improve processes related to digitization, such as the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative or FADGI.

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Challenges

“Pay-to-play”

Not always identified as a stakeholder

Competing internal priorities

Balancing equal representation

There are many challenges to digitization coordination. Part of the problem with restricted funds for digitization is that it gives people the impression they can “jump the queue” if they donate money with the requirement certain materials are digitized. This creates a pay-to-play atmosphere that also makes it difficult to effectively prioritize our collections because we are always working on what the donors want. Donor funds for digitization often don’t include additional funds to support any necessary cataloging or preservation work required to prepare the materials for imaging, putting undue stress on those departments as well.

Additionally, it is increasingly common for grant proposals of many types to require materials to be digitized as part of the project, but the Digitization Coordinator is often left out of the grant-writing and project planning process until funds have been received, and those funds rarely include enough money to complete digitization despite it being a required deliverable. This is something I am actively working to change by ensuring leadership has a clear and accurate picture of the digitization queue and workflow so that they can stress the importance to their staff of communicating with me about a potential project as early as possible.

This communication with leadership also helps with the next challenge of competing internal priorities. When digitization work resumed in earnest following our pandemic shut-down, it quickly became apparent that we would need to regroup about internal priorities in order to determine where things that cropped up during the shut-down fit within the bigger picture of SLA’s goals.

Lastly, one of the biggest challenges to digitization coordination is making sure that our priorities balance equal representation across our digitized collections. We already know that our digitized materials skew heavily toward the natural sciences because of the Seidell fund, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find ways to bring out diversity within our collections. For example, we have been working to identify collections that feature women in natural history, and prioritizing those for imaging, but we still have a long way to go.

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Thank you!

Kira M. Sobers (sobersk@si.edu)

Media Digitization Manager

Digitization and Access Department

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives