The digitization process can be labor-intensive and costly, requiring a substantial investment in handling and processing original materials and their surrogate images. If your organization does not have the staff, equipment or space to do its own digitization, there are services that will do it for you. If you choose to work with a scanning vendor, image specifications should be stated clearly in the contract and sample images (at varying resolutions) should be requested of the vendor prior to the start of the project.
Northern Micrographics, La Crosse, Wisconsin
Northern Micrographics offers a full range of imaging products and services. They scan bound and disbound materials such as city directories, yearbooks, atlases and other books as well as newspapers, photos, negatives and microfilm and fiche. The scanned images can be prepared for web viewing, including OCRing and printed and bound to add to your shelf collections. They work with customers on indexing, file directory structure development as well as metadata development. With more than 50 years of microfilming experience, they can provide you with quality microform products. They can also help you put your digital images online with their software products NDLSWeb, a complete digital asset management application, and PhotoAtlas, an application that lets you put photos online in a geographic context. A 5% discount on all their products and services is available for current Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS) members. For more information, contact Scott Pechacek at scott.pechacek@nmt.com or 800-236-0850 ext. 107
Backstage Library Works does both onsite and offsite scanning.
Luna Imaging offers scanning and digital photography services for libraries and museums.
iArchives digitizes newspapers as well as other documents.
ResCarta Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to provide a community for the creation and dissemination of open source and freely downloadable tools for creating digital collections at no cost to libraries, museums and archives. A complete suite of tools is available for download at the foundation's website. Full source code is also provided for institutions who wish to make enhancements to the projects.