About HEDS
HEDS began in 1996 as the Higher Education Digitisation Service. We were one of many projects funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils under a programme to promote the use of digital assets among Universities. HEDS evolved beyond this role into supplying digitisation and consultancy services to a wide client base. HEDS now operates under commercial imperatives as a fully self-funding not-for-profit activity of the University of Hertfordshire.
HEDS supplies services in support of content conversion to electronic format. We specialise in supporting clients with ‘difficult’ material. That is, material for which routine, high volume commercial digitisation processes are inappropriate. Clients for this type of service include libraries, museums and archives. Clients’ materials often include manuscripts, bound volumes, transparencies, printed photographs, microfilm, posters, maps, glass slides.
Why Use HEDS?
We can digitise your collections ourselves. We can act as a one stop shop so that you don't have to work with a range of suppliers for different types of scanning, optical character recognition, re-keying and choosing an image database.
Working with a range of trusted suppliers, we can obtain the best possible price for your digitisation contract. Each contract has a detailed service level agreement so that there is a full audit trail. Our consultants provide an extra level of quality control before the images are delivered back to you.
We can help you raise the funds to digitise your collections.
Alternatively, we can show you how to digitise your own collections - what equipment to buy, how to operate it, and how to access your images.