Although the Overijssel Historical Centre (HCO) has accumulated extensive experience with the digitisation of cultural heritage material, the Stork photo collection nevertheless proved to be a unique case. The selection of material from the entire collection required solid motivation. Around 80% of the material was of sufficient interest, but it was essential that there weren't too many duplicates or gaps in the selection.

The final intended number of digitised objects (around 10,000) was determined by the amount of time the HCO had available for the entering of the descriptions and other metadata about the objects into a database (Atlantis). This is therefore 'only' a part of the total collection, which contains an estimated total of 25,000 objects.

The digitisation of the collection was made up of two more or less separate processes: the entering of descriptions and other metadata into the database, and the digitisation of the actual images. For this second process, the HCO was responsible for the selection of images.