CEHO Digitization of Archival Collection

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We are interested to bid on the W912HQ-24-S-DIGI - CEHO Digitization of Archival Collection - Department of Army – USACE RFP. We have the following questions for the same. We provide similar services along with emergency scanning facilities to a range of clientele. Can you permit for offsite scanning beyond 90 miles? No. The location provision facilitates progress reviews and on-site inspections by the government. 2. What is the level of preparation required?

(Removal of fasteners, staples, post-it’s, etc.) There will be almost no fasteners, staples, or stickers; however, the vast majority of imagery will be housed in mylar or paper envelopes and will need to be removed for scanning 3. What level of reassembly is required? (Do we need to apply to fasteners, post-it’s and rearrange the documents in the same order after scanning?)

No reassembly required; images will need to be rehoused in their original envelopes/folders in the same order they were prior to scanning 4. Do we need to scan B&W or Color? If color, then what % of documents are color? Client requests scanning in Color for almost all items (excluding B&W negatives) so the percentage will vary by task order/job 5. What is the expected output format? Is it TIFF or PDF? Is it single page or multi-page?

Client requests visual imagery be scanned as high-resolution TIFF files, one file per image. . 6. What are the indexing criteria? (How many fields do we need to index for each file?)

Client requests only five fields (IPTC fields) for metadata/indexing, with first three being the most important: Caption Caption as found on original image or devised based on folder / envelope labels Keywords The name of the subseries within this collection (provided by client) Date Date of photograph found on image (or from content list if not on image) Creator Photographer or donor, if known (rarely used) Description Writer Person or Organization doing the scanning and data entry (vendor name can be batch entered) 7. Can you please provide us a pricing format to enable us to give you pricing as per your requirement? or shall we prepare it ourselves?

Contractor pricing should be submitted in a format similar to Attachment 1 in the RFQ. 8. Do we need to provide the digitized documents in specific folder structure? Yes. There will be approximately 14 folders that equate to significant organizational or topical series. The series will be divided into subseries and then, dependent on the type of media, by envelope or box.

As an example, the contractor should refer to the first page of Attachment 1. The images from “Omaha District” [series] are divided into the subseries “Floating Plant,” and then into individual envelopes such as “Snagboats, construction of.” Slides will be treated in a similar fashion. 9. Do we need to apply any naming convention to files? Within the series, subseries, and envelopes or box, images are to be numbered sequentially.

Using the example in question 8, the naming convention would be Omaha District, Floating Plant, Snagboats Construction of 001, Snagboats Construction of 002, Snagboats Construction of 003.

-The USACE Office of History requires the digitization of a substantial amount of archival material. All the collections consist predominately of paper records, print images, negatives, and slides in various formats. -See the attached combined synopsis solicitation. -This is a WOSB set-aside.