Digitization toolkit: a blueprint for egalitarian access to technology in low-resource environments

FAIN: HAA-304052-25

University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)
Juan Cobo Betancourt (Project Director: June 2024 to December 2024)
Santiago Munoz-Arbelaez (Project Director: December 2024 to December 2024)
Juan Cobo Betancourt (Project Director: December 2024 to present)
Santiago Munoz-Arbelaez (Co Project Director: December 2024 to present)

Participating institutions:
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA) - Applicant/Recipient
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX) - Participating Institution

A prototype toolkit and user documentation to allow lower-resourced cultural heritage organizations to digitize collections at low cost.

This project aims to develop an integrated digitization toolkit to allow under-resourced institutions, collectives, and communities to digitize their archival collections at low cost. Building on a decade of community-based digitization work in the Global South, we seek Level I funding to design and release a prototype of a new generation of tools built on sustainable, up-to-date technologies. We will create an alpha prototype version, test and evaluate the toolkit at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library (CA), and hold listening sessions to identify a series of potential partners for the project's next stages. The main outputs for this project will be (1) the alpha-level working prototype of the hardware; (2) the alpha-level software to power it; (3) detailed documentation for dissemination and reuse; and (4) a network of potential traditional and non-traditional archival partners working towards egalitarian access to digitization technologies.