Selecting the Right Materials for Digitisation: Key Considerations

Digitisation has transformed how libraries, archives, and museums preserve knowledge and connect users with information. Yet the most important truth about any digitisation programme is rarely stated: you cannot digitise everything. Scanning is expensive, storage demands ongoing investment, and staff time is limited. This makes selection the single most consequential decision in the entire process. Choosing the wrong materials wastes resources, while overlooking valuable items can mean losing them to decay. This post walks through how institutions decide what deserves to be converted into a digital surrogate, and why legal clearance must sit at the heart of every selection decision.

Why selection matters before scanning begins 🔗

A digitisation project is not simply about feeding pages into a scanner. It is a planned activity with defined goals, costs, and outcomes. As preservation specialists note, there are no absolute rules for selection, only a set of questions each institution must answer in light of its own mission. A national library preserving a country’s printed heritage will weigh priorities differently from a college library trying to support its current syllabus.

Selection asks three connected questions about any item: should it be digitised, may it be digitised, and can it be digitised? The first concerns value and demand, the second concerns legal rights, and the third concerns physical and technical feasibility. A strong candidate satisfies all three. Skipping any one of them invites either wasted effort or legal trouble.

Criteria for selection 🔗

Most established frameworks group selection criteria around a few core factors: the value of the material, the demand for it, and its physical condition. These work together rather than in isolation, and a thoughtful selector balances them against the cost of the project.

Intellectual value 🔗

The first question is how significant the material is. Rare manuscripts, unique local records, original research, government reports, and culturally important works generally rank high. These items often carry enduring value because they are scarce or irreplaceable. For example, an institution holding palm-leaf manuscripts, regional language literature, or records documenting local history possesses content that may exist nowhere else. Digitising such material protects it against permanent loss and opens it to scholars who could never have travelled to consult the original.

Value is not only about rarity. A heavily used textbook collection has high practical value even if it is not rare. Selectors therefore distinguish between research value, historical value, and instructional value, then match these against the goals of their specific project.

User demand 🔗

The second factor is how much the material is actually wanted. Because resources are limited, it makes sense to prioritise items that users request frequently or that would attract new audiences once available online. A collection that gathers dust on a shelf delivers little return when digitised, while a well-used set of journals or a popular special collection multiplies its reach the moment it goes online.

Demand should be assessed using real evidence: circulation statistics, reference enquiries, interlibrary loan requests, and feedback from researchers. A useful guideline is to consider both the current and the potential audience. Some materials see little use simply because few people know they exist or because the originals are too fragile to handle. Digitisation can unlock latent demand for exactly these hidden treasures.

Physical condition and fragility 🔗

The third factor pulls in two directions, which is why it needs care. Materials that are deteriorating, brittle, or at risk of loss are strong candidates because digitisation captures their content before it disappears. At the same time, an item must be able to withstand the physical handling that scanning requires. A manuscript so fragile that it crumbles on contact may need conservation treatment first, or specialised equipment, which raises the cost considerably.

Condition therefore influences not only whether to digitise but also how. Robust material may be scanned in-house on standard equipment, while fragile or oversized items may require outsourcing to specialists with overhead cameras and controlled environments. The format and size of the original – bound volumes, large maps, photographs, audio tapes – all shape the technical requirements and the budget.

Technical feasibility and cost 🔗

Even valuable, in-demand, well-preserved material can fail the feasibility test. Technical feasibility is among the most important practical criteria, because the physical characteristics of the source and the goals for capturing and storing the digital copy determine the equipment, file formats, and storage needed. Colour fidelity for art reproductions, optical character recognition for searchable text, and high resolution for detailed images each add complexity and expense.

Cost runs through every decision. Digitisation involves staff time for preparation, scanning, quality control, metadata creation, and long-term storage. For this reason, many institutions give higher priority to collections that are already organised and described with proper metadata, since much of the descriptive work is already done and digitisation becomes one more step toward access rather than a project from scratch. Selection, in practice, works as a matrix in which value, demand, condition, and cost are weighed together.

IPR and legal concerns 🔗

A material can score perfectly on value, demand, and condition and still be the wrong choice if you do not hold the right to copy and distribute it. This is why Intellectual Property Rights must be checked early in the selection process, not after scanning is complete. Resolving rights at the end of a project risks producing digital files that can never legally be made public.

Determining copyright status 🔗

The first legal step is to establish the copyright status of each item. Most material falls into one of three broad categories: works in the public domain, which are no longer protected by copyright; works still under copyright, where permission is required; and works whose status is unclear, often called orphan works because the rights holder cannot be identified or traced. In India, copyright in literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works generally lasts for the lifetime of the author plus sixty years, after which the work enters the public domain and can be freely digitised.

Public domain and locally owned material – such as an institution’s own publications, government documents, or works for which it holds the rights – are the safest and easiest candidates. Copyrighted works require written permission or a licence from the rights holder, which can be slow and sometimes costly to obtain.

Fair dealing and library exceptions in India 🔗

Indian law does provide some breathing room. Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 sets out a list of acts that do not amount to infringement. Two provisions are especially relevant to libraries. Section 52(1)(n) permits a non-commercial public library to store a work electronically for preservation, provided the library already holds a non-digital copy. Section 52(1)(o) allows such a library to make up to three copies of a book not available for sale in India for the use of the library.

These exceptions are deliberately narrow. They support preservation and limited research access, but they do not authorise large-scale digitisation of in-copyright works or open distribution over the internet. Section 52(1)(i) further allows reproduction in the course of instruction, a provision the Delhi High Court interpreted broadly in the well-known university photocopying case, where copying for educational purposes was held to fall within fair dealing. Even so, the statute does not explicitly address whether uploading a scanned chapter to a learning platform qualifies, which leaves genuine legal uncertainty that selectors should treat with caution.

Documenting permissions 🔗

Good practice is to record the rights status and any permissions for every selected item before scanning. Where works are in copyright, institutions should seek written agreements that specify how the digital copy may be stored, displayed, and shared. Where access must be restricted, the selection plan should note this so the digital files are delivered only to authorised users. Clear documentation protects the institution and ensures that effort spent digitising actually results in lawful access.

Selection in the Indian context 🔗

India’s major digitisation programmes illustrate how these criteria play out in practice. National efforts such as the National Digital Library of India, developed at IIT Kharagpur under the Ministry of Education, aggregate learning resources through a single search platform, while initiatives like Shodhganga for theses and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library for indigenous medical knowledge target specific high-value content.

These programmes also reveal recurring challenges. Indian institutions have long struggled with the absence of a clear national digitisation and intellectual property policy, the limited availability of optical character recognition for Indian languages, and a shortage of trained personnel. For a selector, these constraints feed directly back into the feasibility criterion: a regional-language manuscript may be highly valuable, yet poor OCR support means full-text searching may not be achievable, affecting how the project is designed and prioritised.

What do you think? If your institution could digitise only one collection this year, would you prioritise a fragile but rarely consulted historical manuscript, or a heavily used set of in-copyright textbooks tangled in permissions? And how should libraries balance the urgency of preservation against the legal limits set by copyright law?

References

1. https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.6-preservation-and-selection-for-digitization
2. https://guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/c.php?g=105219&p=687076
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/selecting-material
4. https://www.margotnote.com/blog/digitization-criteria
5. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1013176/
6. https://www.managingip.com/article/2dwcc61v1ul1gqqg8hou8/sponsored-content/the-internet-archive-case-implications-for-indias-copyright-landscape
7. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.13594
8. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp8/chapter/digital-library-initiatives-in-india-part-i/