Week 4 - “This is historic times” - Now to Organize and Archive It/Them
The Digital History chapter on Preservation contained many interesting observations. I hadn’t really thought about the many difficulties/dangers of preserving historical documents/artifacts through digitization. This article cleared that up fairly quickly.
One random point that I was struck by. They reported that “ink-on-paper content represented an incredibly miniscule 0.01 percent of the world’s information produced in 2003.” Is it just me or is that absolutely incredible. I could probably understand 10% or maybe even 3%, but 0.01? It just makes me realize that there is a lot of information produced. Because I’ve seen some of the ink-on-paper and there’s a lot of that. I’d love to see that statistic fleshed out. Who’s producing all this information and what exactly are we calling information?
A few words on the example sites for exploring organization: I use del.icio.us which is quite similar to Cite-U-Like in some ways. I think both could be tremendously useful tools. I still haven’t fully explored everything that can be done in del.icio.us, but Cite-U-Like adds a potential element of knowing what articles are popular or widely read in your field at any given moment as well. Although this only takes into account those who are registered on the site, so most likely a fairly tech-friendly crowd which is definitely does not encompass all historians. I know the other sites we checked out this week (lifehacker and 43 folders) help organize in various ways, but I still think that the user interface is more confusing than it should be. Simply put, I think there must be a better design than a blog layout. I don’t know what it is, but I hope that it arrives soon.
My digitized image will be up tomorrow. I have to wait until I can get to a scanner.
February 14th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
First, that is a great quote for this week.
I was also shocked by the amount of ink-on-paper documents. I feel like there must be so much more out there that is actually on paper, but then I began thinking about this and other classes where the only way to submit a paper or assignment is via email. Universities and their students probably have high consumption rates of paper, but as we increase the use of email, this is dropping. Universities are not the only one that are turning to digital methods of communication, for several reasons, including convenience, so maybe the amount of paper documents is not as shocking anymore. Could you follow that?