Roadtest the Make it Digital Scorecard

Posted on 29 June 2009 by Thomasin

As the word of our Make it Digital site launch starts to spread, it is a great opportunity to point you to a new resource available on the site which we are really proud of. The Make it Digital Scorecard has been in development and testing over the past six months, and makes its public debut for the first time on this new site.  The scorecard is designed to help organisations decide and prioritise what materials they should digitise.  Now it's out there, we're really keen to hear from people wanting to use it out in the real world.

Back a few years, it was fairly common for digitisation projects to start out digitising with only informal or experimental criteria such as meeting user demand, assisting special events or exhibitions, enabling delivery by email or the web, or testing techniques, workflow or feasibility.  If your organisation is interested in promoting or increasing access to digital content that you hold, this ad hoc approach is no longer enough to make it happen.

In today's rich web and digital media environment we need to view our digitised materials as the basis for building digital collections or resources that users can reuse, repackage, repurpose and build services upon.  If you don't fully consider your purpose, changes in access, the suitability of your technique and the value of the content you digitise, your digitisation efforts are likely to be undiscovered, underutilised and quickly obsolete.  The Make it Digital Scorecard aims to help prevent that by providing a standardised set of criteria that can be applied to a wide range of materials, and a transparent scoring system that leaves room for your good judgement.

While we are excited to be able to make this home-grown resource publicly available for the first time, we are also itching to find out how well it works in a real digitisation environment.  We want to document the process as a case study and make improvements for future versions.  If you are thinking this might be of use in your organisation, and would be open to having us tag along to watch you use it, we would love to hear from you.  In return, you would have the opportunity to tap into our knowledge of how the tool is designed and our network of expertise in digitisation, along with knowing you're helping make more New Zealand content digital!  Drop us a line at advice@digitalnz.org.

We've turned off comments here, but we'd still love to know your thoughts. Visit us on our Facebook Page @digitalnz or on Twitter @DigitalNZ to share any ideas or musings with the DigitalNZ team.