Saskatchewan Digital Alliance

Good practice guides for creating digital content.

"The purpose of this document is to help institutions with digitization standards. It is not meant to create a new digitization standard, but instead summarize and recommend standards already published. Additionally, it includes some considerations for the different format types to help archivists understand, interpret and use these recommended standards.
All standards were selected from Canadian resources where possible. They were selected by conducting an environmental scan, then evaluating the resources based on criteria set by the National Heritage Digitization Strategy (NHDS) such as: introductory vs. detailed information, standards that are institution specific or that were created for widespread use, age of the resource, adherence to widespread digitization practices, uptake by the community, etc." -- Introduction

This resource provides information and procedures for digitizing cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes. It is intended to assist small to mid-size heritage institutions that lack the funds for professional digitization.

This resource provides information and procedures for digitizing VHS video tapes. It is intended to assist small to mid-size heritage institutions that lack the funds for professional digitization.

One of the purposes of this information is "to inform the creative and library communities on best practices for ensuring the preservation of, and long-term access to, the creative output of the nation and the world. These recommendations encourage the use of preservation and management formats, but it is not necessarily intended to direct creators to transform their files into a different format."

The longevity of recordable compact discs (CD-Rs) and recordable digital versatile/video discs (DVD±Rs) is uncertain, leading to a widespread lack of trust by libraries and archives. Research studies, anecdotal information, and manufacturers' literature suggest that the lifetime of CDs and DVDs can range from a couple of years to more than 200 years. This Note explores several of the factors that affect whether a disc fails within a short period or continues to perform well for many years.

The primary purpose of this resource is to provide the necessary software tools to analyze the health of digital storage media and to recover files stored on them.

This resource summarizes some procedures for the disaster recovery of modem information carriers such as CDs, magnetic diskettes, and magnetic tapes following immersion in tap water, seawater, and dirty water. Procedures are also given for dealing with media that have hard-to-remove deposits on them or have been exposed to heat, dust/dirt, mould, and shock.