More Information
What is a Digital Projects Guide?
The new MEAP Digital Projects Guide (2025)(opens in a new tab) provides an overview of the steps involved in planning, executing, and managing a digitization project.
It provides general guidance for
- Defining a project that is feasible, reasonable, and meaningful
- Planning a project by identifying equipment, building a team, designing a workplan, and developing workflows
- Determining the digital object that will affect file-naming, metadata creation, and access to the collection
- Creating a file-naming system that will support the organization and management of the digital assets
- Organizing and managing project data to support the project’s successful completion and to minimize the risk of data loss
It also provides specific information about
- Creating simple and complex digital objects and understanding the relationship between physical and digital collections
- Submitting materials to MEAP and ensuring that sample and batch digitization is organized and complete
- MEAP’s batch review process and what happens behind the scenes to publish digital materials in the UCLA Library Digital Collections(opens in a new tab) repository
Why did we create a new guide?
This new guide was developed to meet two intersecting needs.
- The new MEAP Digital Projects Guide (2025)(opens in a new tab) is intended to provide guidance related to project planning, management, and execution that is not already available in MEAP’s image, audio, and video digitization guides. Those guides provide specific, technical information about which equipment to use and how to use it to digitize different types of material, but they do not provide important information about how to define, plan, organize, or execute a project. The Digital Projects Guide offers an overview of what’s required to manage and execute a successful digitization project from planning to publication.
- The new guide is designed to provide MEAP grantees with some practical information about how to name their files, organize their materials, and transmit their digitized collections to MEAP. These elements are important parts of the digitization process for which MEAP has developed increasingly structured and standardized processes over the years.
How can this guide help you?
MEAP supports many digitization projects working with different types of collections, institutions, and teams, and every project is unique. Nevertheless, there are some elements that are common to all projects.
The new MEAP Digital Projects Guide (2025)(opens in a new tab) highlights common elements across projects and details elements of project planning that can shape and impact a project’s outcome. The guide also details MEAP requirements and expectations related to file naming, batch submissions, and other project management details.