Digitising a major archive for public access

Abstract

The archives department of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has been engaged in a large-scale text digitisation project since March 2008. The project’s ultimate objective is to digitise 1.8 million pages of historic textual material. The Archives database presently contains over 1.6 million pages of textual records and over 55,000 photographs. This project is unique in a number of ways. Although many academic libraries, museums and government agencies have embarked on such large-scale digitisation projects, JDC is a not-for-profit international humanitarian assistance organisation. JDC has a long-standing commitment to archiving the institution’s 100-year history, but a project of this scale was the first of its kind for JDC. Running a large-scale digitisation project at a not-for-profit institution with a very limited budget has resulted in a unique set of project specifications, procedures and tools. This paper describes the project from inception to implementation, suggests future directions and offers some lessons learned and strategies garnered along the way.