Case study: Digitising Cleveland Museum of Art history one negative at a time

Abstract

The Cleveland Museum of Art Archives holds a collection of over 120,000 photographic negatives in a variety of sizes and formats documenting museum exhibitions, events, buildings, objects and people from 1914 to the early 2000s. An important asset to the institution, a portion of the collection was prioritised for digitisation and a team of library and archives staff worked together to make the many choices necessary to begin the project successfully. Always mindful of the costs and benefits of decisions regarding technical specifications, scanning procedures, metadata collection and access systems, the team strived for a ‘good enough’ approach that would make the most efficient use of available resources.