Efforts to Date

Although the grant-funded Collections Cataloguer position helps to maintain the digitization efforts as a large portion of their job description, all Collections department staff have
contributed to digitization over the years and continue to do so when they are able. As there has not been a single, designated person to oversee the digitization process, standards and
workflows have varied greatly, meaning that the current digital records we maintain are not guaranteed to meet the standards outlined in later portions of this chapter. This also means that
it is often difficult to gather statistics about digitization efforts as individual worker information is contained in several different locations and in different formats. Furthermore, some
digitization efforts are focused on the maintenance of existing digital files, rather than focusing on undigitized information. Below we try to demonstrate information as it currently stands in
TMS.


Of 21,895 objects designated as an “Accessioned object” in TMS, approximately 13% have a “Digitized” status flag (2,821 objects).

 

With the most recent Gilberto Cárdenas Collection acquisition, we anticipate accessioning more than 3,000 objects over the course of the next several years, which indicates that these percentages of progress will continue to shrink unless there is a concerted effort towards total collection digitization and future records management procedures.