Tuersley, Sharon and Lawson, Stuart (2013) Digitisation benchmarking project report. Coventry, UK: University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Enabling access to digitised, copyright cleared texts on module reading lists is a highly valued service
to students and academic staff. However it appears that there is very little ability to measure the
effectiveness of this service or to identify a benchmark in order to understand whether a good
service is being provided to customers. This project was set up to address this by aiming to
understand the digitisation service in different institutions, establish robust measurements and a
realistic initial benchmark.
Thirteen institutions took part in the year-long project. The recorded activity included collecting data
for all new and renewal digitisation requests and the average time it took to make the item available
online. This was done across four sample weeks within the academic year.
This data has identified the peaks in service across all the institutions and established an average
turnaround time of 7.6 days which can be used to benchmark our services; something we did not
have before this project.
In addition, the recorded activity has resulted in several immediate impacts for a number of the
institutions. These include:
• upskilling staff to deal with peaks or bring the scanning in-house
• employing temporary staff to deal with backlogs
• investing in new scanning equipment
• researching potential software solutions and in one case the purchase of a software
package
For all institutions the project has enabled them to really focus on their service in order to identify where improvements can be made which ultimately benefit the customers.
The future is a little harder to determine, particularly with the ever-changing digital information landscape. However, the project has created a community of digitisation service professionals who are now connected and have shared their knowledge and their experience to increase their own understanding of digitisation in their own and academic institutions.

Item Type:	Report
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4050 Electronic information resources
Divisions:	Administration > Information and Digital Group > Library
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Library materials -- Digitization, Library materials -- Reproduction, Education, Higher -- Digital libraries -- Great Britain, Digital libraries -- Great Britain, Benchmarking (Management) -- Great Britain
Publisher:	University of Warwick
Place of Publication:	Coventry, UK
Official Date:	December 2013
Number of Pages:	14
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)
Funder:	University of Warwick
Related URLs:	Organisation

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