diglib: Fwd: Bounced message - outsourcing digitizing?

["Kate Ball" <kdball@uoregon.edu>]

Hello all, this is an exchange between Lesli Larson & Jon Jablonski that came to Corey, who is still the list owner for this list.
I am supposed to be taking over 'ownership' and administrative duties for this list, but I'm still working on getting administrative permissions, so messages are still coming to Corey for approval.

He didn't want this conversation to get lost, so I'm forwarding it on to everyone.  

Thanks!
-Kate Ball



From the perspective of Image Services, I would hope that we would seek out
as many possibilities to utilize in house skill sets, equipment, expertise
before seeking an off campus vendor.

In many cases, investment in a new piece of technology for in-house use is
far more cost effective than managing the work of an outside vendor.

My experience with vendors is that it takes almost as much work to prep
materials, oversee safe shipping, establish standards and police quality
control issues as it would to generate content through your own localized
production facility.

As an example, in the last two weeks, I've been working with University
Archives to review the work of an outside vendor who generated over 200+
reels of microfilm for Oregon Hall.  Though the film would not meet national
quality control standards for preservation microfilm, the vendor claims that
the film is OK and does not want to provide a refilm.  One lesson from the
situation is that once materials are out of your hands--even with a tightly
written contract--you lose total control of the production process, and in
many cases, have no means of retroactively enforcing standards or demanding
replacement materials.

I understand that outsourcing might be a necessity for highly specialized
types of digitization or one off projects which would warrant highly
specialized types of equipment.   However, in the forum on Friday, I was
most specifically presenting digitization technologies for which I see an
immmediate use value for the library for ongoing, in-house digital
production projects.

LL




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-diglib@lists.uoregon.edu
[mailto:owner-diglib@lists.uoregon.edu]On Behalf Of Jon R Jablonski
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 8:40 PM
To: Diglib
Subject: diglib: outsourcing digitizing?


I had a conversation at Online Northwest with an OCLC rep (Cynthia Busse)
about our digitizing efforts.  She hinted that OCLC is developing services
along these lines, but didn't offer many specifics.  I though outsourcing
might have come up in last Friday's brown bag, but it didn't.

Any thoughts?

-jon