Skannitavus

Skannitavus is a term used in digital preservation to denote a framework for digitizing physical documents with emphasis on fidelity, metadata, and long-term usability. It describes an approach rather than a single product, integrating high-resolution imaging, multi-spectral capture, color management, optical character recognition, and embedded provenance metadata to produce reusable digital surrogates.

The name is a constructed term used in archival literature to signal an interoperable standard rather than a particular device. The concept gained traction in scholarly discussions during the late 2010s and has appeared in draft standards and best-practice guides for digitization programs.

Core features of Skannitavus include: high-resolution imaging with detailed color and tonal fidelity; options for lossless or visually lossless compression; automatic and manual metadata capture, including source material details, equipment used, and processing steps; explicit preservation metadata such as provenance, digitization date, and agent; alignment with archival schemas (for example METS, PREMIS) to enable interoperability across repositories; and support for OCR, layout metadata, and accessibility features.

Applications span national libraries, university archives, museums, and large-scale digitization projects. Skannitavus aims to improve searchability, reproducibility of surrogates, and long-term accessibility while documenting the digitization workflow for accountability and reuse.

Variants described in literature include Skannitavus Core, for essential digitization; and Skannitavus Extended, for richer metadata and preservation packaging. Critics note the need for community governance to avoid fragmentation.