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.

1. Northern Micrographics, La Crosse, Wisconsin
1. Offers high quality imaging products and services. Northern Micrographics can scan bound or disbound material as well as microfilm in 16mm, 35mm, 105 and aperture card format.  A number of digital imaging post-processing services are available including cropping, deskewing, despeckling, OCRing and image derivative production. Northern Micrographics can also assist with indexing, file directory structure development, and metadata development.
2. Backstage Library Works does both onsite and offsite scanning.
3. Luna Imaging offers scanning and digital photography services for libraries and museums.
4. iArchives digitizes newspapers as well as other documents. They've digitized materials for a number of featured CONTENTdm collections.

Other Vendor Services 

1. 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.