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Partner with DCP: Program Details and Resources

The Digital Concierge Program (DCP) helps state agencies discover, organize, preserve, and share their cultural and historical assets digitally. If your agency is interested in digitizing its sought-after or at-risk collections, or has a story to share online, we’ve provided some guidance below. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions about how we can assist your agency or department.

Why Partner with DCP?

DCP services — including consultation, digitization, and collaboration — can benefit partnering state agencies and departments in a variety of ways that support preserving their history, sharing their story, and furthering related agency goals and initiatives. Here are some ways a partnership with DCP can benefit your agency or department.

Consultation

DCP consults with and advises state agencies and departments regarding best practices and standards for the digitization and digital preservation of their collections. We can connect you with information regarding these overall processes, share resources that provide an understanding of basic digitization concepts and workflows, and send updates on the latest information for these topics.

DCP’s consultation services can support your agency or department’s activities in numerous ways, including:

Sharing professional expertise that can help you find and assess the historical and culturally significant materials in your agency or department and providing guidance on creating an up-to-date inventory of important collections to support digitization.
Providing guidance to help you develop a standards-based digital preservation program that is sustainable for long-term access and use.
Answering your questions about how to establish an accessible catalog or content management system to track and access historical assets.
Pointing you in the right direction if your agency or department aims to establish an in-house digitization program or project.

Digitization

DCP facilitates digitization projects on behalf of our partners, providing complete project management to ensure that your agency or department’s historical and cultural collections are digitized properly. We assist with the selection and preparation of materials and manage all digitization and quality control workflows. Materials may be digitized in-house by State Library professionals or contracted out to a vendor that specializes in working with your unique collections. This process includes advice and support for the ongoing maintenance (digital preservation) of your newly created digital content.

Partnering with DCP on a digitization project can:

Make your organization more visible by revealing your hidden collections.
Produce archival quality digital copies of your collections to minimize the risk of damage or loss to original materials and to support long-term preservation and public access.
Ensure that the public will have access to the digitized materials via the DCP repository, which is supported and managed by the California State Library.
Result in digital content that could also be utilized for internal purposes such as: staff onboarding, training, and telework assignments; intranet content development; and statistics, reports, and presentations that feature digitized materials and highlight work processes, products, and accomplishments.
Provide proof of concept for future projects, support the development of internal agency or department level processes, and potentially serve as justification for additional digitization and/or preservation support at your organization.

Collaboration

DCP can also collaborate with your agency or department to highlight your work and share your stories with the public, guiding and facilitating your online outreach efforts — from exhibits, to webpages, to informational programs and presentations.

A collaboration with DCP can help you:

Commemorate an agency milestone or document the history of your agency or department in a timeline or storyboard to share on a website or as a digital exhibit.
Utilize digital content for public programming.
Highlight your story and share your historic collections through a Google Arts & Culture exhibit hosted by the California State Library.
Engage stakeholders, develop new partnerships, and reach out to a wider audience by promoting your work in an online space.

Digitizing Historical Materials

What is digitization and what are the benefits?

Digitization is the process of making a digital copy of a non-digital object, or the conversion of analog information to digital information. Photographs, videos, recordings, reports, manuscripts, maps, and a variety of other different formats can be digitized. Digitizing one-of-a-kind historical records and collections can:

Facilitate broader access to unique historical materials beyond a single physical location, allowing people to consult records at a distance and from multiple locations.
Help preserve fragile physical materials by providing digital access to the information.
Capture and preserve information that is at a risk of loss due to the damage or deterioration of the original medium.
Ensure that the information found in historical collections remains retrievable in the event of a disaster that leads to the loss of the original physical formats.

What is involved in the digitization of historical materials?

Digitization is not just the act of scanning a non-digital object into digital form; it comprises a series of labor-intensive and time-intensive activities that provide access to the digital copy and make sure that the digital copy will remain accessible for a sustained length of time. As a result, digitization requires specialized hardware and software as well as trained staff familiar with professional standards and best practices to complete the following digitization activities:

Inventory collections to assess their historical value and condition. Because digitization requires a significant investment of time and resources, materials must be thoughtfully selected for a digitization project.
Describe the selected materials so that they can be organized and made searchable once digitized. This descriptive information — or metadata — includes details such as the date and creator of the original object, a description of the object’s content, and information about the context in which the physical object was created. It also includes information about how the object was digitized and details about the rights and use of the digital copy.
Prepare the physical materials to be captured digitally, including any preservation activities that will stabilize and protect the materials during the digital conversion process.
Convert the physical materials to a digital format according to professional best practices and technical standards using the appropriate equipment.
Quality control to make sure that the digital copy and its metadata meet the highest possible standard for long-term access and preservation.
Provide access to digital copies online.
Preserve the digital copies so that they will remain accessible over time. Access cannot be guaranteed for digital copies beyond the short-term without ongoing maintenance and support.

A partnership with DCP allows us to manage and facilitate all of these digitization activities for your agency or department. We provide assistance and oversight of collection assessment, material and metadata preparation, quality control, and ongoing support after project completion. We utilize up-to-date archival standards, contracted vendors, appropriate technical resources, and custom workflows specifically designed to safely handle and digitize your historic collections.

Checklist for Digitization

Are the materials held by your agency or department ready for digitization? To prepare for a partnership with DCP, consider each of the following steps to begin documenting information about your historical assets.

1. Locate and Inventory

What historical materials does your agency or department have? Look for records in various formats: photographs, books, videos, audio recordings, reports, negatives, maps, etc.
Note where the materials are located and how they are stored. Are they hidden away in a filing cabinet, stored in boxes at a remote location, or spread out among various areas and containers?

2. Assess

Are there any original or unique materials that contain critical information about places, people, or events in California history?
Do they provide crucial evidence about the operation of state government and its decision-making processes?
Are they unavailable anywhere else in California?
Do they warrant long-term preservation and access?

3. Prioritize and Select

What records are most at risk of damage or loss due to poor storage, condition, or obsolete format?
Do the materials contain underutilized information or underrepresented subject content?
Which materials are frequently requested but challenging to find, access, and share?
Would you like to publicly display or exhibit the items online?

4. Organize and Describe

Organize and store the materials for secure management and access.
Document each item in a database, spreadsheet, box list, or finding aid that contains specific information such as date, name, title, location, and description. The more details you can provide, the better prepared your agency or department will be for beginning the digitization process.

Every California state agency and department has a mission, a history, and stories to tell about its work and the role it plays in the larger history and culture of California, and there are myriad ways to share this information with the public digitally.

Perhaps your agency would like to include an overview of its history on a website or develop an online exhibit to celebrate an anniversary or other important milestone. Maybe your agency would like to share a significant story that demonstrates its contributions and unique role in California state government. But how do you approach creating a narrative and selecting a platform for your project that will meet your objectives and engage your audience? The following steps will help you get started.

1. Develop Your Topic and Define Your Audience

At the beginning of your project, it is important to first plan how you will approach telling your story.

Outline the goals of your story: Clearly outline the story you would like to tell and describe its purpose and intent.
Define your audience: Who would you like to reach and who are you designing the project for? Consider an approach that will most effectively appeal to the group(s) you would like to engage (e.g., internal staff, specific stakeholders, the general public).
Identify the “Big Idea”: Any exhibit or story should have a thesis statement or a central theme, also known as the “Big Idea.” What is the point you are trying to make? What do you hope people will take away from your project? This throughline will help you develop a compelling storyline for your audience.

2. Research Your Topic

Once you have a sense of how you will approach your topic, it is time to do some research with primary and secondary source materials to learn more and gather information that will help you tell your story.

Primary sources: Primary source materials — such as government records, letters and diaries, oral histories, photographs, videos, and newspaper articles — offer firsthand accounts of events. Primary sources can both inform your narrative and serve as visuals that accompany your narrative (with proper citations and copyright review). This of course includes the records and historical collections held by your agency!
Secondary sources: Secondary source materials like books and articles can help you place your story in the larger context of state and national history and further highlight your story’s significance within its specific historical context.

The California State Library is a great place to start your research journey. You can learn more about the State Library’s collections and services on the Research page.

3. Tell the Story

Now that you have developed your “Big Idea,” completed your research, and identified images and other primary sources that can illustrate your story, how do you compile all of this into a finished product?

Write an outline: An outline will help you organize your thoughts, identifying which parts of the story are most important, determining the most effective order for those elements within the story, creating clear sections to guide the narrative, and selecting the best examples and visuals to help illustrate your story.
Draft your story: Keep in mind that for something like an online exhibit, it is often better to limit your text to just a couple of paragraphs for introductory information and a few sentences for a caption. Use section texts to highlight big ideas and sub-themes that tie back into your central theme.
Select your platform: Identify a platform that can help you best tell your story, meets the needs of your agency and your audience, and fits with the timeline and goals for the project. Do you want to create an interactive online exhibit? A new page or several pages on your agency’s website? A blog or blog post? You may also wish to consider this step in the early planning stages as well, as it can inform how you approach your narrative.

When your agency is ready to share a story or has any questions about the process, don’t forget to contact the Digital Concierge Program. We would love to collaborate with you!