In a heritage context, most material resources are originally in an analogous format and exist per definition only in material form, e.g. artefacts, archival documents and photographs, landscapes and monuments. Digitisation refers to creating digital versions of such resources, e.g. scanning documents and photographs, creating digital 3D models or virtual reconstructions of artefacts, monuments and landscapes (Adamopoulos & Rinaudo, 2019). 

From a heritage management perspective, digitisation has taken on an essential role in recent years for the preservation, communication and accessibility of heritage sites and artefacts. Various creative and technologically sophisticated methods are used, including 3D, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and more. Depending on the nature of the asset being digitised, as well as the purpose of the digitisation, the demands for resolution and other capabilities will vary. In the paper by Adamopoulos & Rinaudo, you will find a comparison of different contemporary approaches for digitising a marble figurine and a Roman column capital. The results showed interesting differences between different approaches using image-based 3D modelling and laser scanning. A general conclusion was that challenges vary with the nature of the object to be digitised, its volume, shape, texture and material and that decision-making for the acquisition and processing workflows needs to take these parameters into account for each case.

1. Adamopoulos, E. & Rinaudo, F. (2019). An updated comparison of contemporary approaches for digitization of heritage objects. 2019 IMEKO TC-4 International Conference on Metrology for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Florence, Italy, December 4-6, 2019