Best Practices for Digitizing Photographs: A Network Analysis of Influences

This paper presents the first significant findings from a major study of how the terms and conditions for building collections of digitized visual resources, particularly historical photographs, influence how users judge archival quality, integrity, and value (and hence usefulness) of the digitized resources. The paper articulates criteria for distinguishing best practice documents from general opinion pieces or reports on experiments. The paper than assesses the cumulative influence and power of seventeen guidelines documents on the development of best practice recommendations and a network analysis of the interconnected patters of influence by individual experts and leading organizations that have sponsored or contributed to the development of community best practices.