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Digitization Standards and Guidelines
UCSC Libraries' Digital Initiatives Department uses federal and UC-wide standards and best practices whenever possible in order to make our collections consistent with digital collections across the country, and to facilitate efficient workflows. We exercise flexibility based on the need of the project. The type of material, donor requirements, target audience, intended use, and funding availability are all factors in the decisions for individual projects.
Following are the very brief, general digitization specifications for material types in the library's digital collections:
Resolution | Color | Bit depth | Master file format/extension | Details | |
Textual materials with no images | Min: 150 Ideal: 400 |
Grayscale | 8 |
Min: PDF/A |
Optional Character Resolution (OCR) applications work best on documents scanned at 400 DPI or higher. Web access files: PDF/A. |
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Textual materials with illustrations | Min: 400 Ideal: 600 |
Min: Grayscale Ideal: Color |
Min: 8 Ideal: 16 |
TIFF | Optional Character Resolution (OCR) applications work best on documents scanned at 400 DPI or higher. Web access files: PDF/A. |
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Rare books and manuscripts | Min: 300 Ideal: 600 |
RGB | Min: 8 Ideal: 16 |
TIFF | |
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35mm slides, film and negatives smaller than 4"x5" | Min: 2000 Ideal: 4000 |
Min: Grayscale Ideal: Color |
Min: 8 Ideal: 16 |
TIFF | We aim for images to have 4000 pixels across long dimension of image area, excluding mounts and borders |
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Photographs (prints) |
Min: 300 |
Min: Grayscale Ideal: Color |
Min: 8 |
TIFF | We aim for images to have 6000 pixels across long dimension of image area |
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Posters, prints, and maps larger than 8”x10” |
Min: 400 |
Min: Grayscale Ideal: Color |
Min: 8 Ideal: 16 |
TIFF | We aim for images to have 6000 - 12,000 pixels across long dimension of image area |
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Audio | 96 kHz | 24 | Broadcast .wav or .aif |
Web access files: 320 Kbps sampling rate. File format: mp3 |
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Video (transferred from VHS or other analog source) | 720x486 | 8-10 uncompressed | .mov or .avi | Web access files: 1.5 Mbps sampling rate. File format: mp4 h.264 | |
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Digital video | Native | Native, or 10 bit uncompressed | Native, or .mov or .avi | Web access files: 1.5 Mbps sampling rate. File format: mp4 h.264 |
For more information about DPI and PPI, see scanning sizes explained.
Sources:
Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Guide to Audio Preservation. May 2015. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub164/pub164.pdf
Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Still Image Working Group. Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials. Draft September, 2015. http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/still-image/
File Naming Conventions
File Management
The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.
The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum.