Librarians in the digital age: planning digitisation projects

The digitisation of valued information resources opens up new avenues of access, use, and research and is an important aspect in the development of digital libraries. Increasingly, librarians are having to manage technical projects to achieve their goals of delivering valuable information to their ever-increasing user base. This is a significant challenge and librarians need the practical skills and the vision to implement such projects in a controlled and manageable fashion. This article describes the key issues in project planning for managing a digitisation project covering the key areas of identifying the vision and the risk management in such technology-based projects. This article also considers the implementation issues and costs associated with digitisation projects. Finally, there is a consideration of the range of skills needed and how these may be developed for managing and running digitisation projects.