One Key Reason to Digitize

German History Buried Under Rubble

I tend to cringe and hold my tongue when I hear people say that digitization is bad for preservation because it makes people think we don't have to preserve the paper or microfilm, which is the only way to keep these cultural artifacts around for the long term. Bollocks. The only way to preserve ALL of our cultural heritage is to digitize it. When I think of the wealth of manuscript and print material that has been lost over the ages, whether like this most recent example in Cologne from disaster, or from war, religious or political book burning, it is clear that the only way to preserve everything, regardless of stripe, is to digitize. And not just digitize, but make freely available so it can be copied and preserved in multiple online libraries and never lost again. One need only think back to the selective "preservation" of the Bush regime when it came to information to also realize that allowing corporate or political interests to steward and preserve is a bad idea as well. Libraries have a critical role to play not just in digitization, but also in ensuring that all information is preserved for future generations.

Comments

[Jodi Schneider]

Mark, Digitization in and of itself is not preservation. Digital preservation is a challenging field that we don't have much experience with, over the long haul. Let alone certifying materials as unchanged!

For manuscripts, burying them in sand was as likely to preserve them as continual copying. (With less chance of textual corruption.)

A secondary issue, which you imply, but don't address directly, is that digitization has the potential to keep materials in the public eye.

[Michael Steeleworthy]

@JS, That said, digital preservation remains an incredible tool that can complement all the other methods available to us today. Digitization preserves the content as opposed to the item, but it also improves access to that content for many more users.

I'd sooner see Google spending its wealth of organizational time and resources by helping to digitize more archival documents important to our cultural history as opposed to items still in copyright..

[DaleA]

Mark - can't agree with you more. That so many libraries still do nothing about scanning their special collections--after the fire in Weimar and the collapse in Cologne, it's all the more clear that the loss of massive collections is not something found only in historical accounts or Eco novels--strikes me as scandalous abdication of what should be one of our core activities.