Supply Panel for Digitisation of Heritage Materials

​Please note: The State Library is no longer maintaining this panel.

Suppliers are encouraged to register on the NSW Government ICT Services Scheme, in the G02 category Digitisation including Delivery as a service.

The Supply Panel has been established to make it easier for the Library and other agencies to access capable and experienced suppliers of digitisation services for heritage materials.

The State Library’s unrivalled collections comprise over 6.3 million items including photographs, paintings, drawings, printed and talking books, architectural plans, maps, newspapers, microfilm and microfiche, oral histories, films and videos, computer software and other objects. The collection is large, diverse, and highly valued and used by many, including students, academics, researchers and the creative industries.

Under the Digital Excellence Program, the NSW Government has contributed significant funds to help fast track the Library’s digitisation program and to upgrade its digital infrastructure. Since 2012, the Library has embarked on a 10-year digitisation strategy that will help cement the Library's status as a world-leading library and centre for digital excellence. The Library is digitising our iconic, at risk, and highly valued collections to make them accessible online. Digital material is being created and preserved on a scale never before seen in Australia.

Many of the items in the Library’s collections are rare, fragile or complex and require specialist skills in handing, digitising and the creation of digital derivatives. To identify specialists with the skills to undertake this work the SLNSW has created the Supply Panel for Digitisation of Heritage Materials.

This panel provides a framework in which specialised digitisation sub-categories can be formed to bring together suppliers who have capabilities and experience with specific physical collection formats.  The Supply Panel has been established with guidance from procurement branches in Department of Justice, Department of Industry and from consultant procurement specialists.

Panel members have been evaluated in a number of criteria focussed around capability and experience in digitising specific collection categories – as well as having their equipment and premises assessed by State Library subject matter experts. Additionally, the respondents are asked to complete a Proof of Concept work sample prior to them being accepted as panel members.

The Supply Panel has been structured to allow other eligible agencies (including local, State and Federal government) access to suppliers who have been assessed by Library specialists, giving agencies more certainty that the suppliers are capable and minimizing the time spent in developing their own assessment and procurement processes.  Using the suite of tender documents created for the panel, Agencies can approach one or more members of the panel can simply define requirements, request a quote and set a time schedule for work to be completed in.

The Library has developed three categories of suppliers under the panel:

1. Digitisation of Printed Materials (books, serials, music, pamphlets etc).
2. Digitisation of Negatives and Transparencies (black & white and colour and from a wide range of film types and sizes) and
3. Optical Character Recognition and related services

In the first two years since establishment of the three categories of the Supply Panel for the Digitisation of Heritage Materials, the State Library has awarded 16 contracts with a combined value of $1.5M dollars.  The projects have created over 3M high quality digital master files from books, pamphlets and film negatives and transparencies single sheets and 1.1M files from OCR of book pages.