Digitization
My experience with digitized texts thus far just blows my mind. The accessibility alone seems worth the cost. But then, of course, I haven’t had to pay for anything. I wonder if any library has thought to charge for access to something digitized, as they might charge for a reprint or as you’d pay for a photocopy.
The issue that most sticks in my mind is whether to just scan pages or to make them machine readable. I have definitely lamented many times that I couldn’t search a scanned PDF file. Though it certainly makes more sense for any document that has “original” value, such as something handwritten.
My concern with digitizing, and libraries in general, is access. We all talk about how great it is, how everyone will benefit…but here’s the concern that’s been nagging me lately: what happens when I graduate and lose my affiliation with a university? How much of all this digitization will really be available to the public? Also, given that we now know about the different methods and what they mean for quality, will we have to judge providers? Will Google, for instance, use an unchecked OCR program? Will it provide scans of handwritten documents or will everything be rekeyed? How much do we need to question the digital sources we’re using?
February 7th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Your question on access (and losing it once you are unaffiliated with a university) is a good one. I tend to think that google (or someone trying to compete with them) will increase our access to many of these digitized images in the next 5 years or so, but this is largely avoiding a huge copyright debate that I think google is mired in right now. The only surefire way to keep your access - never leave the university. Never.
But really I do think it’s an important issue to confront that only those who can afford to be affiliated with a university can have access to historical documents. When I think about how important history is to understanding society and ourselves, I think it’s a terrible loss for underpriveleged people (who don’t have access to university databases) to not be able to understand their own history through these important resources.
February 7th, 2006 at 11:57 am
I am glad someone else has a few misgivings when it comes to the world of digitization. You are right what happens when you are no longer attending American? A simialr issue arose for my oler sister when she graduted from her undergra university. She no longer had access to the schools database, but she needed to do some research, luckily by that time I was attending her former university and was able to give her my log on information to allow her to access the database, but now I know longer have access to my undergraduate schools catalogs. So what happens when I leave AU. My interest in reading will not wain simply because I have graduted.
February 7th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Right. And my other question is, once we’re shut out, do we need to be concerned about the trustworthiness of public databases like Google?
February 7th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
It’s funny how much things come full circle - the modern university grew in many ways out of the need of scholars to congregate around the only places with large libraries of accesible books: the University libraries. The ironic thing is that while the digital world promises to free us from the need to be in a physical place to access information, the political economy of actually creating those digital resources excludes those without the more traditional university affiliations…
February 7th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
But can’t you go to a college’s library and do research without paying tuition? There’s no check on you using the computer. Granted, you probably wouldn’t be able to print, but there is still access to view and read that material.
December 24th, 2006 at 11:53 am
very best idea!…
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