Services

Digital asset management is a key skillset for stewards of digital collections. If you are new to this work, we can help you navigate strategies, tools, and best practices to keep your collection organized, accessible, and presentable with flexibility.

Metadata is the language we use to describe items in our collections. Metadata is what facilitates online search, allowing our collections to be useful to a wider audience. While metadata says a lot of about stuff, it can also say a lot about ourselves, our values, and our inherent biases.

Northwest Digital Heritage Metadata Requirements is a great starting place for working with us. We also suggest reading through our Metadata Remediation guide for a broader discussion about the cultural implications of our metadata decisions.

To go further, please refer to the Oregon Heritage Commission's report, Addressing Harmful Content in Collections (Rose Paquet, PhD, 2024)

Northwest Digital Heritage can help you assess your needs for online hosting of your collections, and we can help you choose the right platform for your community. The State Library of Oregon can host basic digital collections for smaller Oregon-based libraries and museums for free; please reach out to us for more details about that. For Washington-based institutions, please contact the Washington State Library for more information.

Metadata aggregation is a fancy term for how we can connect your digital collection records (metadata) to a national discovery platform, currently the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

All three Northwest Digital Heritage partnering agencies provide some level of grant funding for these projects. In Washington, please check out Washington Digital Heritage Grants from the Washington State Library. In Oregon, check out the Oregon Heritage Grants and Oregon Museum Grants from the Oregon Heritage Commission, and Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant opportunities from the State Library of Oregon.

We can also help connect you with other potential funding opportunities, so please reach out with questions and ideas.

Depending on the size and extent of your original materials, Northwest Digital Heritage can provide a certain amount of on-site digitization services for Oregon-based communities. We also have flatbed scanners and photography copystand kits that we can loan to your institution, along with training and other resources to help you get started on your own. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us about this.