Policy news: Digitisation policy and procedure

The new Digitisation Policy outlines the University's approach to identifying principles and priorities for the digitisation of Australian National University (ANU) collections including works in the library, archives, colleges and works produced by the ANU Press. It supports the excellence in research and education as outlined in the strategic plan.

Digitisation of collections will improve research and education by meeting the changing nature of research and teaching and staff and students expectations of online access. The current generation of students expects that the information they need will be online, either on the Internet, discoverable by search engine, or provided online by virtue of their enrolment in a particular course through the University’s learning management system. Researchers are increasingly requiring access to online full text and images collections to support efficient research practice. Digitisation of collections will protect unique research material from overuse by providing access to digital representations of collections.

The new Digitisation Procedure was developed from and will supercede the existing guideline The Australian National University library digitisation policy and plan. Following a review of this guideline it was identified that there was a need for an overarching policy and procedure to establish framework in order to develop a systematic digitisation core business service, as opposed to the current project based approach which was no longer compliant with ANU policy governance framework. Consultation was undertaken through meetings held which included a majority of relevant stakeholders. These meetings helped to form the steering committee and the basis of the policy and procedure. The policy and procedure was circulated to the steering committee, the Library Advisory Committee, ANUSA and PARSA, who were given the opportunity to provide verbal and/or written feedback, which was then incorporated into the policy and procedure.