Others in this thread have all made useful comments, but I think it would pay to take a step back first and ask yourself some questions about your situation: (*) what's your volume of material? Do you have a single book? a shelf of contents? a room of content? a multi-site organisation full of content? (*) what are your resources? Do you have techies? Do you have cataloguers? Do you have volunteers? Do you have machine-readable catalog records for the books? Is there good authority control for the people in the archive? Do you have existing finding aids? Do you have a book scanner? (*) Are you working as part of an enduring institution with a demonstrated commitment to archives? (*) Have you looked around for possible consortia to join? (*) Have you looked around to see who else has already digitised closely-related materials? (*) Which languages are the archives in? (*) Do you have a collections policy? ... The more detailed the answers, the better we'll be able to give you advice rather than just push our prejudices at you... cheers stuart -- I have a new phone number: 04 463 5692 ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of P.G. <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, 15 October 2014 9:55 a.m. To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [CODE4LIB] Digitization Project from Scratch Hello, Anyone has experience in digitizing archival materials? I need your recommendations/suggestions on how we can start with our digitization. We need to build a searchable website so the public can access our materials of images, publications and media files. What platform did you use? Open-source or fee-base? What is your experience using it? Basically, we started using Sharepoint but at this point, I believe it is only good for sharing of internal documents. We are on a limited budget so we may need to host it on our own server as well. Any feedback or persons to contact for more info is highly appreciated. Thanks. Chris