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Best Practices for Digitization

The following quick reference guides are intended to help our contributors that choose to scan their own materials. If you have any questions, please contact Digital Library Services at the University of Minnesota Libraries. You can also find detailed information at the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative and Library of Congress Digital Preservation websites.

Quick Reference Guides

Images

Adapted from Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices, Version 1.0 (January 2003).

Swipe horizontally to see full set of table data.

Attribute

Master Copy

Spatial Resolution

3000-5000 pixels on the longest dimension

Spatial Dimensions

100% of original

Bit Depth

1 bit bitonal
8 bit grayscale
24 bit color

File Type

TIFF

Compression

none or lossless

Sample Resolutions for Common Photograph Sizes

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Original Size

3000 pixels on longest dimension

5000 pixels on longest dimension

2" x 2"

1500 ppi

2500 ppi

3" x 5"

600 ppi

1000 ppi

4" x 7"

450 ppi

725 ppi

8" x 10"

300 ppi

500 ppi

Audio

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Recommendation Level

Master File

Web Access File

Oral history and other spoken language broadcasts

  • File format: WAV / BWF
  • Sample rate: 48 kHz
  • Bit-Depth: 24 bit
  • Format: MP3
  • Bit Rate: 192 Kbps

High frequency / high quality source material (such as musical recordings)

  • File format: WAV / BWF
  • Sample rate: 96 kHz
  • Bit-Depth: 24 bit
  • Format: MP3
  • Bit Rate: 192 Kbps

Further Reading

Video

Standards and best practices for video digitization projects vary widely. We direct you to some of the recent resources developed by both the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines project and the Library of Congress.

Further Reading