From Box to Bin – Semi-automatic Digitization of a Huge Collection of Ethnological Documents

Abstract

Especially in the field of cultural heritage preservation, one has to deal with information formerly collected on non-digital media such as paper, which is highly subject to deterioration and decay. The phrase “From Box to Bin” provokes, because it is connoted differently when not used in context of digitization. Most digitization projects follow a very straightforward workflow to convert documents into digital data. “From Box to Bin” literally depicts the workflow of our digitization project, based on a huge archive of ethnological documents, in which documents are filed in boxes. On the one hand, our project is aimed at long time preservation of documents on film reels in metallic bins stored under the earth’s surface in a closed mine. On the other hand, documents are converted into binary data, which will be provided for research within a digital archive system. In this article, we describe our very specific digitization workflow and the experiences, we have had with it so far.