Paradata for Digitization Processes and Digital Scholarly Editions

As libraries and archives are increasingly digitizing their collections, their resulting digital reproductions are now also reused in various research outputs. Because their patrons typically come from diverse backgrounds, however, many of them lack the necessary experience with the intricacies of the digitization process to judge how this process may have affected the quality of the reproductions they intend to (re)use. Without easily comprehensible paradata (i.e., data that indicates how they were made), patrons have no choice but to take these digital objects at face value—which is a problematic research practice. To illustrate some of the ways in which the digitization process may affect the reproduction, this chapter discusses a case study where a researcher commissioned the digitization of a collection of manuscripts held by various memory institutions across Sweden. By zooming in on how quality standards are negotiated between researchers and library staff in a specific digitization project, and the problems they needed to resolve along the way, this chapter examines which types of paradata could be useful to contextualize digitization processes and gives a concrete suggestion how the reusers of those digital reproductions could in turn provide essential paradata to contextualize their own research outputs.