Professional Preservation Standards and Community Historical Societies

There is little argument that some digitization and collection description standards are needed in order to effectively share the world's library and museum collections on the web.

To satisfy a global collection sharing goal, relatively complicated and costly cataloguing systems are being advocated by library, museum, and archiving professionals. The professional side of the debate suggests that it should be done once, and done to professional standards.

On the other side of the debate, resource constrained and volunteer managed community historical and genealogical societies often do not have the expertise or funding to accomplish what salaried professionals are advocating as standards.

Therefore, many community historical and genealogical societies may be left to design their own approach and standards for collection preservation and sharing. It may be appropriately decided that the typical vintage photo in a community historical society collection does not need to be scanned at the same resolution, and described in the same detail as an item in the scanning department of the Smithsonian.

The LocalArchiver would suggest that moving ahead with some level of digital preservation and sharing is more important than hoping to someday digitize a collection to professional standards. In the meantime, originals will still be properly stored with archival quality materials.

At a minimum, community societies can select some of their best photo and document images and share these with their local community through online galleries. Placing photo and document images on a website or share site is within the ability of many volunteers. For step by step guidance and discussion of alternative approaches, visit LocalArchiver.com.