Introduction

Quality control is a critical component of digital collection projects.
Digitization project managers must ensure projects have appropriate quality control measures to assess:
- Condition of equipment
- Quality of master files (e.g., colour, bit depth, image dimensions, encoding methods, etc.)
- Quality and accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR)
- Quality of access copies
- Adherence to file naming guidelines
- Adherence to file organization guidelines
- Quality and accuracy of descriptive metadata
- Quality and accuracy of final deliverables

Quality control of digitization equipment

Scanning equipment should be periodically tested in accordance with the ANSI/AIIM MS44 (1993) Recommended Practice for Quality Control of Image Scanners.

Quality control as part of digitization process

Spot-check each batch of TIFFs to ensure images are correctly oriented:
1. Rotate TIFFs 90 or 180 degrees as necessary
2. Load inverted images into Photoshop and “flip horizontally” or “flip vertically” as necessary
Spot-check TIFFs to ensure the images are correctly organized and named:

1. Use Adobe Bridge to batch rename files as necessary.
2. Copy/past files into correct directories and rename directories as necessary.
Rescan slides if necessary.
Implement workflow changes to correct and prevent future errors.

Scan targets before each scanning job

Use Scan2Net reference scan targets.
Create reference scans using the technical specifications for the material that will be digitized as part of the scanning job. For example, if the scanning job involves colour letter-size documents, then scan the targets with the technical specifications for colour letter-size documents.

Quality control in access platforms

Images should be periodically checked during the digitization process and after access copies are uploaded to the Archives Catalogue or other platforms.

Perform routine quality control checks on access copies uploaded to the Archives Catalogue and Online Collections or DalSpace to ensure:
1. JPEG images are oriented correctly
2. Pages are not skewed or incorrectly split
3. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is successful
4. Colour is not distorted
5. PDF is not excessively large
6. Sound recordings and moving images have good quality sound and video
7. Produce and upload new access copies necessary.
8. Implement workflow changes to correct and prevent future errors.