Digitization Projects of Documentary Collections in Academic Libraries

This paper is focused on digitization projects of documentary collections in academic libraries. The aim of the work is to suggest an evaluation of digitization projects by using a set of parameters deduced by the observation of national and international models. To create this evaluation scheme it has been necessary to look at the recent national and international academic literature and compare different case studies. The parameters were created by thinking about the whole process of digitization and also taking into consideration an user centred evaluation. The created evaluation scheme has been tested on a sample of digitization projects of Italian, European and American academic libraries. With this kind of analysis it has been possible to check the validity of the evaluation scheme created, to identify points of strength and of weakness within the Italian system and to compare it with the international best practices analyzed.