Organisational Best Practices
Table of contents
Overview
Different institutions have different organisation structures for digitisation. Some may have their own in-house IT development staff, whereas some may outsource digitisation to contractors.
For example, at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (Luomus), the digitisation workflow involves a digitisation team and three IT staff, one digitisation software developer/manager, one server administrator, and a data manager (Luo1). There are digitisers and one IT manager at Herbarium João de Carvalho e Vasconcellos (LISI), Universidade de Lisboa. For the Natural History Museum (NHM) London, digitisers and the data management team are involved in digitisation workflows. Different models have their advantages and disadvantages, which should be well considered before the starting of digitisation activities based on an institutions own situations.
Recommendations
Automation and Software Developers (O1 & O2)
This best practice describes the benefits of automation and software development.
Level: Basic
Use Case: As a museum director I want to use limited monetary resources efficiently so that I can provide best value to society.
Recommendation:
O1: Automate recurrent routine tasks as much as possible as part of the ETL process.
O2: Employ/acquire one or few software developers instead of adding more digitisation staff to speed up digitisation.
Discussion
Software development is expensive, but spending development resources in automating tasks will eventually save money by reducing staff costs (or allow using those staff more efficiently).
Implementation Example:
Instead of having staff manually create thumbnails with an image editor, develop an image service that does the job; use existing image libraries available (such as ImageMagick).
Authors
Zhengzhe Wu and Esko Piirainen
Finnish Museum of Natural History (Luomus)
Contributors
Lisa French, Laurence Livermore
Citation
References
Licence
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Last Updated: 17 June 2022
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