SPEC Kit 341: Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach · 111
DUKE UNIVERSITY
ROAD 2.0: Digitizing Outdoor Advertising. Final Report
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/digital-collections/files/2011/04/NARA-FinalReport1.pdf
NAR09-RD-10017-09 Digitizing Outdoor Advertising Final Report
2
1. Scanning and Costs
27,515 total images were produced by this project, exceeding original projections of
approximately 24,000 images. The rapid pace of digitization enabled the project
team to expand the original scope of materials. Even with this expanded scope, total
digitization costs for this project also came in below projections, for a total cost of
$97,488.30 to digitize images for the ROAD database (see Table 1 below). Total
digitization costs divided by total images produced yields an average cost of $3.54
per image, well below the project goal of approximately $5 per image.
Table 1: Planned versus Actual Digitization Expenses
Budget Category Planned
Expenditures
Actual
Expenditures
Notes
Digitization Assistant
wages
$33,333.50 $23,337.50 0.5 FTE 20 hour/wk
Digitization equipment $2,500.00 $2,500.00 Zeutschel planetary scanner
Contract digitization
services
$11,640.00 $19,141.71 Vendor digitization of slides
Shipping costs $250.00 $257.09 Shipping slides to vendor to
digitize
Cost share: staff salaries $49,706.00 $38,973.07
Fringe benefits $17,410.35 $13,278.93 Cost share +appropriated funds
TOTAL DIGITIZATION
COSTS
$114,839.85 $97,488.30
Digitization Assistant
Speed and efficiency of digitization work kept costs at a minimum. Rita Johnston, the
digitization specialist hired by the grant, proved to be both quick in digitization work
(scanning and quality control) and accurate and careful in metadata review. Rita
scanned photographs, worked with a vendor to digitized slides and negatives, and
conducted quality control on all images, which included cropping, inversion of
negatives, and color level adjustment.
As she digitized and performed quality control on the images, Rita reviewed the
existing metadata records to ensure that the image in hand matched the existing
description. This work also involved checking the file names of the digitized images
against the file identifiers that exist in the metadata to be sure that images would
match with the database records. Her metadata verification also involved quick
corrections of typographical errors and routine normalization.
An additional factor contributing to lower costs for digitization was a decrease in the
projected rate for Library Assistant-banded positions at our institution.
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