Digitization at Purdue
The Purdue University Libraries provide a range of services in creating and capturing digital content. The Libraries offer services in digitization, creating digital surrogates of physical objects. This includes in-house scanning of a wide-range of formats, including printed materials, manuscripts and letters, photographs and negatives, and oversized materials such as maps. Descriptive metadata is created for scanned objects, facilitating search, discovery, and display.
These services can be used in several ways. First, they can be used to create digital versions of existing print research collections or other physical collections (e.g., photographs). Second, digitization processes can be used to create digital files for research. Although there are often copyright issues that need to be resolved in advance, physical materials such as field notebooks can be digitized to enable their contents to be more easily used during research.
Many of these techniques can also be used to create collections of born-digital materials (e.g., websites, digital publications, digital photographs, etc.).
Resources at Purdue
Digitization projects – The Purdue Libraries have hardware and software to assist with a wide-range of digitization projects, and maintain relationships with vendors for handling highly specialized projects.
Description of digital resources – The Libraries are home to expertise in the development of metadata to describe digital resources, whether in the Libraries’ collections or not.