by Patrick McDonough | Feb 5, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News
Every digitization program makes choices, whether explicitly, through habit, or by sheer backlog pressure. What gets digitized first is rarely neutral. It reflects institutional values, risk tolerance, funding realities, and (often unintentionally) assumptions about...
by Patrick McDonough | Feb 2, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News
At Digital Transitions, we spend every day working alongside museums, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions navigating the realities of preservation-grade digitization. One thing has become increasingly clear: while standards, workflows, and...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 14, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News
Digitization in Action: Real-World Cultural Heritage Projects and Proven Workflows Every cultural heritage digitization project comes with its own challenges—unique materials, institutional goals, preservation requirements, and access demands. While standards, best...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 10, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News
Film Scanning & Transmissive Material Preservation: Workflows, Tools, and Best Practices for Cultural Heritage Film and other transmissive materials—negatives, slides, panoramic strips, and fragile reels—are among the most cherished and simultaneously challenging...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
Film Scanning in Practice: Building Accurate, Scalable Workflows for Transmissive Materials Digitizing film and other transmissive materials presents a unique set of challenges—extreme resolution requirements, focus precision, color inversion, and the need to balance...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
The Domino Effect: Navigating Crisis in Archival Preservation Discovering chemical decay in film collections can trigger a cascading series of urgent preservation projects that require immediate infrastructure overhauls. Balancing physical safety with digital...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
Smarter Metadata with AI: Accelerating Access to Motorsports History Artificial Intelligence offers a scalable solution for processing massive photographic backlogs that would otherwise overwhelm internal staff. Training custom models to identify specific...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
Using AI: Tips, Techniques, and Pitfalls Combining high-speed capture with AI-driven text extraction can transform static physical records into dynamic, searchable datasets. Success with Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on precise prompt engineering, including...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
From Detail to Context: Digital Provenance as the New Standard in Digitization Technical perfection is not enough; a digital image must include its “digital provenance”—the context of its creation—to be truly valuable. Paradata, or the documentation of the...
by Patrick McDonough | Jan 8, 2026 | Cultural Heritage News, DT Roundtable
Human-Centered Digitization: The Future of Heritage Imaging Shifting the focus from pure pixel count to operator experience allows institutions to “do more with less” through improved ergonomics and automation. The new Phase One iXH 250MP dramatically...
