Digitization of Choirbooks in Guatemala

This paper presents the details about the digitization of a Guatemalan polyphonic choirbook, part of a larger collection held at the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala (AHAG). The digitization of this music book is the first step in a larger project that will result in images and symbolic scores semi-automatically retrieved from those images using music-encoding technologies, with the goal of preserving and increasing access to this repertoire. The AHAG does not have the resources to digitize this choirbook collection, as it does not have its own digitization and conservation departments. Moreover, given the books’ large size and status in a special collection, there was no digitization equipment in Guatemala suitable for the task. In this paper, we present the details of outsourcing the conservation task, the design of a do-it-yourself book scanner, the digitization workflow, and other recommendations for similar projects where the resources to conduct the digitization are not readily available within the archive.