1. No one really thinks about why the item is being scanned
When people talk about scanning something or putting it online, their reasons for doing so can be shockingly vague. People will say things like "to make it more available", or "to make it easier to search", but often what they really want is something completely different. I have had a faculty member initiate a scanning project for photographs only to find out that what they really wanted was to blow up the images so he could see them better. After the first few test items, and him complaining about how he couldn't see the images well enough, it became obvious what he wanted. We changed the project to scan the images at a higher resolution to make it a bit easier for him.2. No one thinks about what, exactly needs to be captured during the scan
When people first start out, they think of scanning as a pretty simple process of just taking a picture of the item and putting it online. However, there are actually layers of information that can be captured in an item. For a typed page, you may want to just capture the text/information on the page (which you could have someone transcribe), or you may want to capture the image of the text on the page or the typesetting, or you may want to capture the paper in great detail to show the fibers, or to show stains or damage the paper has sustained. Each of these objectives would require a slightly different scanning standard to capture the required item.3. People want "high quality" digital items, they want them quickly, and they don't want it to cost too much.
You can't have your cake and eat it to, at least not in digital projects. It is rare for a digitization project to be both full of requirements, fast, and cheap. More than likely, the process will take many more months than people expect, and cost about 3/4ths what they thought. Why is this the case? Because people have a tendency to focus on the scanning and the scanning equipment. They think the most time consuming part of the process is image capture, and that the most expensive part of the process is buying the scanner itself. However, metadata creation and putting the items online typically takes the most time, and the scanner itself is usually 1/3-1/4th the cost of a project, next to human resources costs, the cost of setting up a system to host the items online, and the cost of securing the digital files for long term preservation.
4. They don't experiment with a small number of items first
While it is commendable that people want to get started immediately and dive in, how you dive into a project makes a difference. If you set up your process and standards, and then dive in by scanning 1,000 items, you may be horrified to find out that none of those items are going to work for their intended purpose and you have to do them all over again. A better method of diving in is to start with one item, take it completely through the process with an eye toward tweaking the process and testing the final product. Make sure that what your producing is indeed what is needed. Then, do a few more items and record how long each step took, and use those numbers to estimate the time and resources needed for the rest of the project. You'll have a much better idea of how the rest of the project is going to go, and you'll not have wasted a lot of time doing the wrong thing.
5. They avoid assessment, and avoid reprocessing
There is a tendency to celebrate the end of projects and then turn a blind eye to them while you focus on new more interesting things. With this thinking, a project is successful because it is complete. However, digitization projects need to be checked on occasionally to make sure they're still working. Make sure to set up a web statistics package on the collection so you can monitor usage, and then check on it at least every year. Sometimes, what you find out is that something about the system or metadata is preventing the project from reaching it's users. At that point, some part of the project has to be reprocessed. Don't fear reprocessing. Often, fixing the problem will be faster than you imagine, and it's much better to have a working collection than a broken one.
This list is based of the book Digitizing Flat Media: Principles and Practices, a practical book about the nuts and bolts of Digitization for those who are just starting out, available for purchase at Amazon.
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