Digitization Overview

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Digital preservation is defined as the “formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable.” This means that our main goals in Digital Initiatives and this lab are two-fold: Our first goal being access, our second goal being use. The University of Idaho Library houses thousands of primary research sources, most held in Special Collections and Archives. In and of themselves, these sources provide insight to not only the history of the University, Idaho, and the Northwest, but also Agricultural Science development and Life-Science development.

We are the forefront of making these sources accessible and usable for the public and for researchers, locally and around the world. Our digitization efforts allow the information in materials to be accessed more broadly and used for more projects while still keeping originals intact and available for local, non-circulating, use. The images we create, the information we publish, all directly relates to the original source material; our descriptions, our dates, our titles, all relate to our goals of access and use.

The materials we are working with in this lab are not designated to leave the library either because of their value (irreplaceable, original copy, monetary cost of replacement) or their condition (too fragile to circulate, too delicate to withstand continuous handling). Because of this, it is our job to accurately represent information in a way that upholds the integrity of the materials. This means that we must provide accurate and detailed descriptions of items (photographs, texts, journals, etc.) and do our best efforts to research subjects, dates, and locations in order to make access and use possible for the largest possible audience.