Background
Digitisation often involves working with hundreds or thousands of images,
documents, audio clips or other types of source material. Ensuring these objects
are consistently digitised and to a standard that ensures they are suitable for
their intended purpose can be complex. Rather than being considered as an afterthought,
quality assurance should be considered as an integral part of the digitisation
process, and used to monitor progress against quality benchmarks.
Quality Assurance Within Your Project
The majority of formal quality assurance standards, such as ISO9001, are intended
for large organisations with complex structures. A smaller project will benefit
from establishing its own quality assurance procedures, using these standards
as a guide. The key is to understand how work is performed and identify key points
at which quality checks should be made. A simple quality assurance system can
then be implemented that will enable you to monitor the quality of your work,
spot problems and ensure the final digitised object is suitable for its intended use.
The ISO 9001 identifies three steps to the introduction of a quality assurance system:
- Brainstorm: Identify specific processes that should be monitored
for quality and develop ways of measuring the quality of these processes.
You may want to think about:
- Project goals: who will use the digitised objects and what function
will they serve.
- Delivery strategy: how will the digitised objects be delivered to
the user? (Web site, Intranet, multimedia presentation, CD-ROM).
- Digitisation: how will data be analysed or created. To ensure
consistency throughout the project, all techniques should be standardized.
- Education: Ensure that everyone is familiar with the use of the system.
- Improve: Monitor your quality assurance system and looks
for problems that require correction or other ways it may be improved.
Key Requirements For A Quality Assurance System
First and foremost, any system for assuring quality in the digitisation process
should be straightforward and not impede the actual digitisation work. Effective
quality assurance can be achieved by performing four processes during the digitisation
lifecycle:
- The key to a successful QA process is to establish a clear and concise
work timeline and, using a step-by-step process, document on how this can be achieved.
This will provide a baseline against which actual work can be checked, promoting
consistency, and making it easier to spot when digitisation is not going according to plan.
- Compare the digital copy with the physical original to identify changes and
ensure accuracy. This may include, but is not limited to, colour comparisons,
accuracy of text that has been scanned through OCR software, and reproduction of
significant characteristics that give meaning to the digitised data (e.g. italicised
text, colours).
- Perform regular audit checks to ensure consistency throughout the resource.
Qualitative checks can be performed upon the original and modified digital work
to ensure that any changes were intentional and processing errors have not been
introduced. Subtle differences may appear in a project that takes place over a
significant time period or is divided between different people. Technical checks
may include spell checkers and the use of a controlled vocabulary to allow only
certain specifically designed descriptions to be used. These checks will highlight
potential problems at an early stage, ensuring that staff are aware of inconsistencies
and can take steps to remove them. In extreme cases this may require the
re-digitisation of the source data.
- Finally, measures should be taken to establish some form of audit trail that
tracks progress on each piece of work. Each stage of work should be 'signed off'
by the person responsible, and any unusual circumstances or decisions made should
be recorded.
The ISO 9001 system is particularly useful in identifying clear guidelines for
quality management.
Summary
Digitisation projects should implement a simple quality assurance system.
Implementing internal quality assurance checks within the workflow allows mistakes
to be spotted and corrected early-on, and also provides points at which work can
be reviewed, and improvements to the digitisation process implemented.
Further Information
Implementing Quality Assurance For Digitisation
[ Home Page - Surveys - Documents - Presentations - Search ]
