Colorado Digitization Program

After its creation in 1998, the first major project undertaken by the Colorado Digitization Program (CDP) was the creation of the Heritage Colorado.  Funded through a 1999 IMLS grant, this project encouraged cultural heritage institutions of all types and sizes to participate and contribute metadata records describing their digital materials to a central database.  This database, called Heritage Colorado, was hosted on a server owned and maintained by the Colorado State Library.  The grant also established a data archive, paid for technical support from Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (Alliance), and provided for the training of cultural heritage staff throughout the state.  Dublin Core metadata standards that were collaboratively created by the cultural heritage institution community in Colorado were tested as part of the project.  In addition, Heritage Colorado supported the testing of the best practice documents that were developed under the earlier Colorado LSTA grant in the areas of metadata and digital imaging.

The Heritage Colorado project funded 18 digitization projects involving 63 libraries and museums and resulted in the creation of over 47,000 images through mostly library-museum partnerships.  When the CDP became the Collaborative Digitization Program, the resource was renamed Heritage West and participants in the CDP continued to add to its content.

The CDP presented a model for statewide collaboration across libraries, museums, historical societies and archives on digitization projects, making a shared infrastructure available to participants and partners, lowering the cost of making digital assets available to users and visitors and making digitization a reality for cultural heritage institutions of all sizes.  By the time the final report for the grant was submitted in 2003, the work of the CDP had given more than 80 Colorado cultural heritage institutions the institutional capacity to undertake digital imaging initiatives.