So What is Digitisation? 

Part 1 : The What is Digitisation? Series

In this 3 part series on What is Digitisation? I will be introducing you to the world of digitisation, such as what it is, how it’s done, how it has come into play in our everyday lives and the current state of digitisation.

In this 1^st part on What is Digitisation?, we will cover what digitisation is, what materials can be digitised and some of the equipment is used to digitise these materials.

Definition

So what is digitisation?

Yasar describes digitisation as the process of converting analog information into a digital format. When we talk about an analogue object, we are talking about any non-digital objects like paper, books, photographs or microfilms, that is being converted to a digital format, like a pdf or Word document, that can be saved electronically and read by a computer.

Digitisation is done using a variety of different types of hardware and software, each one tailored to the specific need of the material. For materials such as papers and photographs, the hardware we would require is the use of scanners or cameras, such as flatbed scanners, book scanners, and even smartphones to scan a document to be able to digitise it.

Equipment Used

Book scanners are specifically designed to be used to scan books, manuscripts and any other bound materials. They were designed for large-scale document scanning and due to their advanced technology help to preserve materials much better by being able to capture information with high speed, precision and clarity, especially when dealing with fragile materials. Flatbed scanners are scanners that have a flat glass plate where one can place documents, photographs and other items to scan them.

Audio-visual materials, such as VHS and cassette tapes are also considered analogue objects and can also be digitised. This can be done using hardware such as a laptop, USB or SD card, RCA cables and sometimes requires software suited to digitising these kinds of tapes. To convert VHS and cassette tapes into a digital object, we have to connect a laptop to a VHS player using the RCA cables, put the VHS tape into the player and hit play, the software will then convert the contents of the tapes to a digital format which can then be stored on the laptop or the USB or SD card. This is explained in the video below :

Digitisation software is used to help to clean up images and make them clearer to view by adding light or tone and by removing stains, blurs and shades. Software such Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office is also needed on computers to be able to convert the materials into pdf, Word documents or any other format as well as the have the ability to read and edit these documents. Software is also needed to clean up, cut and edit audio-visual materials as well as the proper software to be able to view the newly digitised and converted materials, such as MP4 or Blu-Ray.