Culture in Transit was a partnership between the Metropolitan New York Library Council, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Library that brought mobile scanning equipment to smaller libraries, archives, museums, and the communities they serve.

The project offered library patrons and cultural heritage institutions an opportunity to create digital copies of their materials using state-of-the-art equipment. Digitized materials were shared with the public through local digital archives and also through the Digital Public Library of America. Culture in Transit was one of twenty-two projects to win the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge on Libraries in 2014.

The Culture in Transit Toolkit is an outcome of the Culture in Transit project. It is intended to serve as a resource for other organizations interested in initiating mobile digitization services. All or parts of the Toolkit can be used and adapted as needed. Included in the Toolkit are resources for organizing and executing community engagement events; implementing and offering a mobile digitization service to small cultural heritage institutions; and providing advice, comments, and considerations on equipment used for digitization, with emphasis on mobile digitization kits.