Planning for digitisation
{
"now": "2025-06-30T23:03:42.908Z",
"expiry": "2025-06-30T23:03:47.697Z"
}
With the 2025 Deadline for digitising of analogue materials approaching, it is important to work out the priorities and systems for digitising the analogue items in your collection. The guides in this section will help you to do a digitisation plan, set up equipment and workflows, set up digital storage, and learn to digitise analog materials - photos, video and audio. It also outlines how to conserve fragile or damaged material, and add extra data to your catalogue as you go.
This step by step guide (and download version) helps you to get started with digitising your collection, covering key concepts, challenges of digitisation, how to develop and implement a digitisation plan and some useful resources.
This guide outlines the recommended digital formats for digitised media- audio, video and photographic.
This step by step guide outlines equipment needed for digitising audio, video and photographic media with workflows for each. The media player checklist helps to identify the media types in your collection and player equipment needed to digitise these items.
This document outlines recommendations for storage of archival collections along with pros and cons of various options. There is a policy template to help guide planning.
These step by step guides and downloads help you to prioritise the order in which to digitise your analogue collection using a rating system. The disposal policy template guides the process of removing items from collection.
A specialist accredited skill set is in development to teach archive workers how to digitise audio, video and photographic media. Resources will be added here once complete.
Digitise analogue items according to the workflows, order of priority, digital formats and digital file naming system decided in the planning phase above. Resources are in development for digitising of analogue audio, video and photographic materials.
Add any further metadata to the catalogue or access platform as you digitise each item. See resources in the Share section of Toolkit for adding metadata into the Mukurtu platform as well as the taxonomies or lists of values for specific data fields.
Damaged, dirty, mildewy or fragile media items should not be played or digitised in-house. These may require specialist services to recover the content. Special training is needed to identify media in need of repair and how to undertake some basic repairs in-house. Damaged or fragile items should be sent to external conservators following permission of Archive custodians.