In the digital lab at The New York Academy of Medicine Library, we work on taking an idea and creating interactive solutions that help an interdisciplinary community of users to learn and grow. Digitization offers an opportunity to participate in a complex process that touches a variety of domains and expertise while providing the wider public with access to vast amounts of cultural heritage material. This process includes taking a rare book/manuscript from the shelf, digitizing it from cover to cover, creating an online and interactive representation, and making it available to the wider world. Each step in the process requires thinking about the preservation and conservation of the physical object, imaging of the physical object for long-term digital preservation, creating metadata, curating content, developing and designing interactive software, exploring user experience and access, and planning for long-term sustainability.

Within the last two years, I have built a digital lab to image our rare materials and developed the Library’s Digital Collections & Exhibits website to host our digitized material. In this talk, I will discuss our digitization process and how we take a physical object and create a digital collection or online exhibit for anyone to explore.