If that were not reason enough for moving rapidly towards greater digitisation in the public sector, there's money.
Concerns about offering a poorer service to disadvantaged groups have held back moves towards digitisation in many public service organisations, particularly in rural areas.
Well, for the moment, the publicly funded library is proceeding cautiously – not least because it lacks the public funding for a mass digitisation programme, which is why it has formed a partnership with the genealogy website Brightsolid, which will undertake the work.
In an announcement on May 10th, the university says its libraries, museums and archives will provide free universal access to high-resolution digitisations of holdings in the public domain.
But for this, public sector leaders need to be fully behind digitisation, and they need both to ensure their digital knowledge is up to date and recognise when it is not.
Better yet, museums should open source 3D digitisations of the artefacts, giving the public direct access to the collections and democratising the data for all.
The backlog of unresearched material in GLAMs can provide a valuable framework for data gathering, cataloging and digitisation and also can be used as a form of public engagement with cultural heritage, the concept of the citizen historian is already well established [21].
Film mammograms were digitised with a laser scanner designed for mammogram digitisation.
Meanwhile, public sector leaders do not always make the most of the savings made through digitisation, which often involve politically sensitive job losses.
By working with these, and other similar projects, it is hoped that recovered data (post imaging and digitisation) can be utilised by a wide academic community and even the general public.
