Access to the Library Items
January 4th, 2008 by 
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Nowadays information technologies become more and more popular and develop with each year. It refers also to the educational sphere. As a result of such development, University of Oxford initiated in 1998 study program which lasted nine months and involves digitization activities of past, present and future. This study program became well known as ‘Scoping Study’ and was completed by July of 1999. In this article main result of the study program is described.
To coordinate the digitization needs with the demand on the digitization projects special poll among the staff of the Oxford University was held. As the result appeared several new areas for investigations. The investigators examined all criteria for decision if particular items are ready for the digitalization and if the digitalization is necessary. To realize the project the committee published special recommendations concerning existing decision matrices. All the matrices and guidelines were published on the official website of the program. Besides, the results of the investigations were available for other US educational institutions after some work with copyright. On the report a series of categories are described under which digitalizing items can be accessed. Moreover, different digitalizing methods were presented.
The next step was to identify potential collection (in this context ‘collection’ means single book, item manuscript, entire archive). It was studied and investigated with the aim to provide initial assessment to the items. Simon Tanner worked on the producing of the ideas concerning new methods of simple accessing.
The list of collections was also published in the report on the website of the program, but because of security needs this list is not available for all people. Concerning each collection there is a brief of main problems such as lack of cataloguing, problems with copyright, etc. besides, in the report presented some recommendations concerning the salvation of these problems.
The University of Oxford still invest big sum of money on the digitalizing projects.
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