Comment #1: It is interesting to see just how much consideration is given to cost vs. profit in regard to whether or not documents are digitized. “Local historians would ecstatically greet a fully digitized and searchable version of their small-town newspaper, but it would not justify hundreds of thousands of dollars in digitizing costs” argue Cohen and Rosenzweig. This dilemma speaks to the issue of memory and power that has so plagued traditional mediums of historical text. The historical moments that are recorded or researched by historians are the ones deemed important enough to receive critical analysis. The reality that small newspapers are not digitized due to the inherent value of much larger nationally published newspapers is disconcerting. The articles, editorials, and images in these smaller publications are just as valuable if not more significant than larger newspapers; however future generations may never get to see that. Particularly if the world of digitizing passes on the opportunity to archive smaller publications simply because the cost-benefit analysis deems them not worthy. The advances made in regard to digitization have allowed historians to record and archive text, images, and video in ways previous generations never imagined. And it is important that an air of democracy is present within the decision process in regard to what is and is not digitally archived for the generations to come. Comment #2: In discussing the formats within which text can be digitized Rosenzweig and Cohen address both the advantages and drawbacks of such a reality. In particular visual representations of text vs. machine readable text. Rosenzweig and Cohen assert that “as mere visual representations of text, page images cannot be searched or manipulated in the same ways as machine-readable text.” They make a valid point with this argument however the emotion and character of hand written text is in some ways destroyed when transcribed into a digital format. So, why not do both; present a visual representation as well as a machine readable text of the given document. I realize this contention contradicts the earlier arguments made by Cohen and Rosenzweig over the cost-benefit analysis of digitization however it may be the solution to many of the issues they discuss.
Comment#3: In their chapter entitled Becoming Digital Cohen and Rosenzweig state “The project directors cited a range of reasons for their choices. The most common explanation they offered for doing projects onsite was that the original materials were rare or fragile.” This lead me to believe that there is an seemingly untapped job market for historians/preservationists that also have backgrounds in digital history/computer science degrees. Facilities should have onsite departments that deal with the issue of digitizing audio visual.