Abstract
This paper will illustrate, with examples from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the approach followed during a digitisation project.
We have rationalised our approach to take into account whether the project is object or image archive centred. Our approach is different for each type of project. The differences are; the business drivers, the participants, the budget funders and the metadata management.

Object centred projects tend to be more expensive, need more labour and co-operation and have more business restrictions than those projects based on existing image archives. Post production management routines tend to be the same but the efforts before and during digitisation considerably different. With an object centred project factors such as object movement, photographic style and creative skill and legacy metadata sources are large factors in their success. Image archive centred projects can be reduced to a scanning exercise where skilled but non-creative individuals can follow a reduced process.
Though the large institution may have greater resources, the size of the collections they want to digitise can be daunting. The opposite is often the case for the smaller institution where they may struggle with the process but in a short period may achieve the digitisation of a substantial part of their collection.

James Stevenson is the Photographic Manager of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has responsibility for the management of all image creation and image storage within the museum. James Stevenson has been at the V&A for ten years where he has managed the change from a traditional analogue service to a modern one where electronic cataloguing and image creation is becoming the norm. The V&A Photographic Studio is a partner in the SCULPTEUR and ARCO EU IST projects, which will give it an advantage in the management and retrieval techniques for its images and multimedia. A direct result of his management is the growing emphasis on a more creative approach to museum imagery where the contribution of the photographer directly relates to the understanding of the object by the photographers input. He is currently engaged on installing a colour management system for controlling all of the museums image creation.
James Stevenson was previously at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich as Chief Photographer. He has been employed as a photographer since 1974.