neylon

Digitization is, in my opinion, a huge technological advance for researchers.  It is now possible to view and search many writings, and browse through photograph collections with a speed and ease that I would not have imagined a few years ago.  I discovered the online archives of the Cold War International History Project in my senior year of college, and was amazed at the number of sources I could look at without leaving school.  Without that archive, I would not have been able to research and write about Cold War history for my thesis.  I believe that everything that we should digitize everything we can.  Though it is not always a replacement for the original, when provenance and the social biography of the information or object are important, I think that digitization is an important democratization of access to our cultural heritage.

One of the important things that we have to remember when considering digitization is the audience.  As Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig point out in Digital History, historians must analyze the audience for potential digitized materials to determine whether that audience is real.  This makes sense, because it is important to have a resource that many people will use, in order to make the expense of digitization worthwhile.  Unfortunately, this limits the creativity of researchers who are unable to travel to the location of the materials they need.  If their topic of interest is not a popular one, it is not worth it to reproduce it digitally.  Do you think we will reach a point where it will be economically viable to digitize even the obscure papers, photographs, etc.?

I found it very interesting that outsourcing occurs in this field, as well, and that outsourcing of digitization to other countries is hidden because of the surrounding political controversy.  I understand outsourcing to other companies, because of the cost benefits, but I wonder about the reliability.  Maybe I just am very hands-on, but I prefer doing things myself.  However, when many of the places that need to digitized information do not have a lot of money to put towards it, do they have much of an option?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.