Contributor Resources

Creating, describing, caretaking, and sharing digital collections is not rocket science, but it does often involve making hundreds of informed decisions along the way. We’ve gathered together a number of helpful resources– and in some cases created our own – communities and organizations to utilize for your digital collections journey.

Selection Criteria

In most situations, digitizing an entire collection of items is unrealistic given our limits of time and resources. Coming soon: tips and strategies for approaching a digitization project that will help meet your community goals and needs.

Please reach out to us to chat more about developing a selection criteria for your community and collections.

Metadata Guidelines

Metadata is what makes and keeps your digital items findable through search. It is often descriptive, but can also encompass technical information about your digital objects, and administrative data related to your project, collection, and/or organization.

Go to metadata guidelines

Digitization

We have a lot of experience creating digital objects from physical ones! We can help you get started, too, with digitization resources, training, equipment, and consultations for handling special formats.

Learn about NWDH digitization

Checklist

If you’d like to participate in NWDH’s metadata aggregation efforts, we have a checklist to help you prepare.

Get the checklist