• Home

• News & Events

• Still Image Working Group
  • Participating Organizations
  • Advisory Board
  • Sub-Groups
  • Documents and Guidelines
    • Technical Guidelines for Digital Imaging
    • Digitization Activities - Project Planning
    • TIFF Image Metadata
    • Digital Imaging Framework
    • Content Categories and Digitization Objectives
    • Gap Analysis
  • Resources and Industry Standards
  • Papers & Presentations
  • Provide Comments

• Audio-Visual Working Group

Related Resources

• Glossary of Terms
• Sustainable Formats

RSS     E-Mail

CONTENT CATEGORIES AND DIGITIZATION OBJECTIVES: REFORMATTING HISTORICAL PRINTED MATTER, DOCUMENTS AND MANUSCRIPTS, AND PICTORIAL MATERIALS

Table of Contents

• Content Categories Overview
• Content Categories and Subcategories
       (each subcategory links to its objectives)
• Explanatory Notes

CONTENT CATEGORIES OVERVIEW

T — Textual and illustrated printed matter (books, journals, manuscripts, some maps). Visual-arts elements of limited significance and generally consisting of printed halftones, line art, explanatory tables and drawings, and the like.

PR — Visual/pictorial items (photographs, prints, some drawings and paintings, some maps). Generally greater visual-art significance than category T. Two-dimensional, many with continuous tone images (and occasional halftones). Viewed by reflected light.

PT — Photographic negatives and transparencies. Significant visual-arts elements. Viewed by transmitted light.

AR — Special-purpose images produced by reformatting aerial, medical, and scientific images, architectural and engineering line drawings and blueprints, where the originals are viewed by reflected light.

AT — Special-purpose images produced by reformatting aerial and medical images, where the originals are viewed by transmitted light.

3D — Objects, artifacts, and three-dimensional works of visual art encountered in archives, galleries, and museums (medals and badges, physical evidence from legal archives, some works of art). See also category SPA.

SPA — Specialized imaging of works of art and other objects and artifacts. For future development. To include such examples as two-and three-dimensional works, art in a frame, items with and without gilding, three-dimensional objects in history and science museums, etc.

SPR — Special-purpose imaging for research and analysis (multi- or hyper-spectral, X-ray, other technologies). In libraries and archives with a cultural heritage emphasis, this category pertains to the creation of specialized images for the analysis of the physical properties of item the institutions' collections. This category is also a placeholder for the large and important category of born-digital (i.e., not reformatted) scientific and medical imaging, carried out by a number of federal government agencies. For future development.