FADGI compliance has now become a critical part of managing digitized records, especially for federal agencies and organizations that handle cultural, historical, and public records.
These guidelines, which focus on achieving high-quality digital reproductions, ensure that digitized records meet stringent quality standards, helping preserve these important documents for future generations.
Whether you’re already working within these parameters or just starting to understand the importance of these standards, navigating FADGI compliance is essential to protecting the integrity and accessibility of your digital archives.
What is FADGI?
FADGI stands for the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative. It’s a set of guidelines developed to standardize the quality of digital images, audio, and video files for federal agencies and organizations managing historically significant collections. These standards are designed to ensure high-quality digitization that preserves the integrity of original materials, enabling long-term access and usability.
FADGI focuses primarily on image quality, establishing a star-rating system (ranging from one to four stars) that helps organizations assess the accuracy, resolution, color fidelity, and overall quality of digitized images. The higher the star rating, the more precise and faithful the digital copy is to the original source.
Within the initiative there are two distinct groups, the Still Images group, and the Audio-Visual group, each responsible for standardizing archival processes for their respective mediums.
Working in tandem, the efforts of these two groups has led to the creation of a wide range of recommendations covering everything from specific metrics and technical specifications to general digitization processes and methodologies.
What is The Purpose of FADGI?
The purpose of FADGI is to create uniform standards for digitizing cultural heritage materials, ensuring that digital reproductions meet high-quality benchmarks. These guidelines help federal agencies and other institutions produce accurate and reliable digital copies that reflect the details of the original materials as closely as possible.
By setting clear expectations for image quality, FADGI enables organizations to standardize their digitization efforts, making sure that scanned documents, photographs, and other media are preserved for long-term use. This not only helps safeguard important cultural records but also facilitates better accessibility and usability of these digital collections.
Ultimately, FADGI’s goal is to create a consistent approach to digital preservation that allows future generations to access, research, and learn from digitized records in the highest quality possible.
Who Needs To Comply with FADGI?
FADGI primarily affects federal agencies and organizations tasked with digitizing culturally and historically significant materials. However, it’s not just limited to government institutions. Libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions that handle large-scale digitization projects or manage public records can benefit from adhering to FADGI standards.
Private sector companies involved in digitization services are also increasingly adopting FADGI guidelines to ensure their output meets the high-quality expectations set by federal agencies. For these organizations, following FADGI helps guarantee that their digitized content meets industry standards, ensuring both long-term preservation and accessibility.
In short, if your work involves the digital preservation of documents, images, or multimedia files—whether in the public or private sector—FADGI compliance is critical to producing reliable and high-quality digital records.
What is FADGI Compliance?
FADGI compliance refers to following a set of standards designed to ensure that digitized materials meet high-quality benchmarks. These standards are outlined in FADGI’s technical guidelines, which, when paired with the Digital Imaging Conformance Evaluation (DICE) testing system, create a reliable framework for consistent and accurate digital reproductions of important historical and cultural records.
The primary goal of FADGI compliance is to minimize image quality variability, ensuring that digitized records are faithful to the original materials. FADGI’s approach combines technical guidelines, best practices, and quality assurance to produce the highest quality digital reproductions possible.
The four key components of a FADGI-compliant digitization program are:
Technical Guidelines
FADGI provides comprehensive guidelines for digitizing cultural heritage materials. These guidelines can also be supplemented by standards from organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and input from equipment manufacturers, professional associations, and imaging consultants.
Best Practices
A FADGI-compliant program follows established workflows and processes that address common challenges in digitization, ensuring consistent quality and reliability.
Digital Imaging Conformance Evaluation (DICE)
Consistency is essential in a FADGI-compliant program. Digitization efforts must include reliable and repeatable methods of measuring image quality. This involves ongoing testing and validation, especially when any changes occur in equipment or workflows.
Staff Training and Certification
Successful FADGI compliance requires trained staff with experience in both handling materials and operating digitization equipment. Staff need to be proficient in the entire process, from preparing the materials to ensuring the final digital output meets FADGI standards. Without skilled personnel, achieving FADGI conformance is not feasible.
Why is FADGI Important for Government Agencies?
Government agencies must archive records with significant historical or cultural value. Typically, any records that need long-term preservation are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), where they are permanently stored.
NARA has established that all permanent government records must meet at least a 3-star FADGI rating to be considered “preservation grade.” This standard applies to both newly created and archived materials. As of January 1, 2023, records that do not meet this standard will not be accepted by NARA.
How Do I Find a FADGI Compliant Scanning Company?
If you’re looking for a FADGI compliant scanning company to help you digitize historical records, you’ve come to the right place.
SecureScan has been a leading provider of secure document scanning services for government agencies for more than 21 years. Our experience, know-how, and top of the line commercial grade scanning equipment will help you produce FADGI compliant digital reproductions of your documents at an affordable cost. Get in touch with one of our scanning experts today for more information or a free quote.
Frequently Asked FADGI Questions
What Are the FADGI Digitization Guidelines?
The 2023 revision of the Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials is a working document created by the FADGI Still Image group that builds on more than two decades of shared experience of the cultural heritage imaging community.
This document contains technical specifications and best practices for federal agencies who need to digitize cultural heritage materials, including textual content, maps, photographic prints, and image negatives.
The intended audience for these guidelines are cultural heritage digital imaging professionals, and those who will be planning, managing and approving digitization projects for federal agencies.
The FADGI Guidelines are intended to be paired with the appropriate image analysis software, which is an essential component of any FADGI-conformant document imaging program.
What is the FADGI star system?
The FADGI star system is an unbiased 4 star ranking system used to grade the quality and accuracy of a digital reproduction.
Instead of relying on confusing specifications and exaggerated marketing slogans, the FADGI ranking system outlines 4 distinct quality levels of digital imaging, ranging from one to four stars. Higher star ratings indicate a higher quality image, with 4 stars being the maximum score.
FADGI recognizes that not every digitization project requires perfect digital reproduction. Limited budgets, time constraints, and actual need all play a role in the level of quality required for a given project.
In fact, there are many instances where creating higher tier images offers no clear advantage. FADGI addresses this directly with its 4 star rating system, clearly indicating the use cases for every quality level.
The 4 possible scores of the FADGI star system are:
One Star Score: This level of reproduction is acceptable for images that will be used to reference an original document, or when there is no intent on repurposing the content.
Two Star Score: This level of reproduction is appropriate for at home / in office scanning applications, when a second copy is needed for informational purposes only.
Three Star Score: A three star image would be considered an accurate reproduction, good enough for almost every professional purpose, including professional reprinting, archival, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A three star minimum will be required for all government records submitted to NARA starting on January 1st, 2023.
Four Star Score: Four-star images are state-of-the-art reproductions created at the highest quality level practical today, and are suitable for any application.
How are FADGI star ratings calculated?
A digital image’s FADGI star rating is determined by evaluating a wide array of characteristics, including:
- Sampling frequency
- Tonal response
- White balance error
- Lightness uniformity
- Color accuracy
- Color channel mis-registration
- Spatial frequency response
- Reproduction scale accuracy
- Sharpening
- Noise
- Skey
- Geometric distortion
- Field artifacts
- Color management
- File format and compression
These specific image characteristics were selected and validated by years of use at participating Federal Agencies.
Specialized software known as digital image conformance testing tools offer precise and repeatable analysis of these variables, putting image consistency at the forefront of FADGI conformance.
