Digitisation and Cataloguing

This section contains the guidance documents, templates and forms required by grant holders and their project teams to assist with digitisation and cataloguing. The documentation for reporting on the progress of the project and requesting further grant payments are to be found here.

• Digitisation guidelines
• Cataloguing guidelines and templates
• Submitting your material
• Resources and guides - EAP books and British Library Collection Care leaflets

Digitisation guidelines

Documentation and guidance for digitisation.

• Guidelines for photographing and scanning archival material 2017 (PDF)
• Tips for digiting books (YouTube video)
• Sample image feedback form (PDF)
• EAP guidelines for audio preservation (PDF)
• Remote Capture (PDF; EPUB; MOBI; XML)
  • Remote Capture - Digital Appendices (PDF)
  • Remote Capture [Arabic version] لقطات نائية

Cataloguing guidelines and templates

Documentation and guidance for metadata creation.

• Preliminary metadata questionnaire (DOCX)
• Cataloguing Guidelines (PDF)
• Cataloguing template (XLSM) for reference only
• Cataloguing template for sound and video recordings (XLSX)
• Example of a completed template for a sound project (XSLX)
• Guidelines for producing surveys (PDF)

Submitting your material

The final digitised material should be saved on one or more external hard drives and sent to the EAP office postal address. Sample images and metadata can be sent electronically. We normally recommend using a service such as WeTransfer as these file sizes will normally be too large to send via email.

Hard drives for PCs and Macs are not necessarily interchangeable. Researchers working with Apple Mac computers will have to reformat the external hard drive they submit to the British Library as exFAT or FAT32. This makes them readable on both Mac and PC.

• Apple's guidance on formating hard drives for Windows computers 

Drives submitted to the British Library should always be unpartitioned and never password protected. We strongly recommend that you purchase a solid-state drive (SSD) with rugged casing.

You must create checksums for the files you send us. This is to ensure that no corruption has occurred during transfer. It's good practice to create these checksums as soon as you have created the final TIFF images. We recommend DROID, Bagger, and FastSum. Please contact us if you have any questions about this.

You will need to complete the form below and send it electronically to the EAP curator prior to sending your hard drive. You will also need to print a copy and include it with the hard drive when sending it to the EAP office.

Project Submission Form (DOCX)

Project Submission Form for projects with digitised audio recordings (DOCX)