Digital Library Federation 2019 Capacity Presentation Script Slide: 1

                                
DLF 2019 Capacity Presentation Script

Hello, my name is Shannon Willis, and I am the Digital Projects Lab manager at the University
of North Texas. I will be talking today about a series of steps we took to come up with a way to
measure our digitization labs capacity in a meaningful, and hopefully accurate, way.
So, first some background. The Digital Projects Lab at UNT digitizes materials both for other
departments within the Libraries and for external partners across the state of texas. We have
over 400 partner institutions with whom we have built The Portal to Texas History, a digital
repository of over 1.5 million items related to Texas. We also add to and maintain the UNT
Digital Library.
The imaging work done in the UNT digitization lab is overseen by 2 librarians, but the bulk of the
actual digitization work is done by an army of student employees (the number of part time
student employees over the years has been as high as 20, but is now kept at around 10 to 12).
The librarians (myself included) manage the students, create and oversee the workflows, and
perform quality control on the images created by students.
Our standard workflow for digitization projects goes like this. When it arrives, an initial inventory
is completed by a librarian and the project is prepared for digitization. It is then assigned to a
student employee who digitizes the materials according to our standards. A student lead does a
first pass of quality control ensuring no items in the project got missed. Then a librarian does a
final quality control check, which includes, among other things, a 100% visual check of all
images created (bc we use students and this is super necessary). Then the project goes on to
be OCR'ed, uploaded, and metadata-ed. Then finally, a final inventory is completed on the
project to ensure nothing went missing before we send it back to the partner.
So why do we care about knowing/measuring our capacity. Well, we do a lot of stuff for a lot of
different people. We typically have 50 active projects at any given time, and again we have
over 400 partners across the state. So it is important that we give all of those partners accurate
information about when they can expect projects to be completed. We also have many
stakeholders within the libraries itself, and many different people from different units bringing in
digitization projects for us to do. So it's important that they all understand exactly how much we
can actually do in a given year and then respect that capacity.
So, what did we do...
The first attempt. staff timed the scanning of individual objects on each of the different imaging
systems in the lab. The goal was to know how long it takes to digitize an object on the different
systems. Ostensibly, one could then calculate out from there. Figuring out how long it would
take to scan large projects based on the number and kind of items they had. And if you know
how many student hours you can expect in a given year, you can then figure out how much stuff
you can theoretically do. These are the times from that trial, based on the equipment we had at