This series of resource papers provides information to help guide you as you review and select collections for your digitization projects. Over time additional resource papers may be added to the list. The papers are intended to provide a basic introduction to the topic and to offer suggestions for planning your digitization project. The papers focus on issues to consider as you select, organize, handle and prepare collection items for conversion to digital formats.

As you plan and prepare to organize a digitization project many questions will occur to you such as:

• Who is my audience?
• What is my purpose?
• Which collections are most appropriate for digitization?
• How fragile are these materials?
• What is the ownership status of the materials?

The papers will help you decide which questions are important to your project and which answers come first in your project plan.

The five papers cover these topics:
1. Selecting and Preparing Collections to Digitize.
2. Rights and Permissions to publish digital collections.
3. Indexing and Metadata for Digital Objects.
4. Digitizing special collections: newspapers, maps.
5. Preservation of digital projects.

The resource papers have been compiled by the staff of the Digital Images Initiative, Washington State Library.