Why not digitise everything?

as an archivist there is one question I dread not what is an archivist I love my job and I can talk about it at length it is after all looking after the written heritage of the world not it must be lovely working with all those old documents it is no the question I dread is aren't you going to digitize it all the answer is simple no so why do I dread the question well the answer is simple but the reasons for the answer are complicated firstly there is a lot of stuff take the boxes behind me each one of those boxes could contain a couple of volumes of about 300 pages each or they could contain hundreds of single documents of all shapes and sizes something like this and we don't just have a few boxes in this archive alone we have five kilometres of boxes so size matters then there is the question of expense digitizing does not come cheap first of all you have to consider the shape and the size of the documents they need careful handling to take a decent digital image this takes people and people and time cost money then there's the question of have you got the right to copy this if you wish to digitize them all and make them available online you need to clear that copyright with every copyright owner that is a mammoth task which requires an awful lot of resources assume that you have cleared the copyright and you have the staff to make documents nice and flat ready for digitization then you need the equipment to digitize with the camera the stand the lighting the space and then you need a person to operate the camera the lighting space those all cost so you've achieved all of that you've got your digital images then what do you do well then you have to store them you're already storing all of these boxes worth of material you have to continue to store those they are the originals they are the authentic historic documents and now you have to store the digital version too and that isn't easy you may remember diving floppy disks what happened to those you may remember three inch floppy disks what happened to that you may use CD ROMs every day but what will happen to those and now of course there's cloud storage you have to preserve that image to preserve the paper in the parchment of the originals you need to look after the environment make sure your building is sound make sure the roof doesn't leak protect against pests such as mice and then the documents will last for centuries with digital it's not quite the same technology moves on and so you have to move on with it your digital image needs you to keep working at keeping accessible and keeping it working for you but storing and preserving and not enough either you need to make this digital image available how are you going to do that are you going to do it on the web if so you need an interface that people can use that people can search this requires indexing so that people can find the images that you've got and find the one that they actually need that all takes time people and then finally is providing a digital image actually reducing the amount of information that is available to the public a digital image produced online is often black and white and not very detailed this allows it to load quickly and be readable but the original is in full color you have an idea of how big it is you have an idea of what it's made of you can see and feel the texture you have connect with the past in a way that a digital image cannot allow you to do you can see how that document was produced you can learn from the way it was produced more about why it was produced and then it also cuts you off from who has the document now an online image of a document doesn't necessarily explain to you where that document has been for 800 years or where that document is now why it is survived who has the responsibility of looking after it that way of disconnecting people from the originals can have a detrimental effect on the archive services that look after the the less people connect with those services the more the people who pay for those services wonder whether it's worth it and they may reduce the budgets of those services which of course means that those services will have less money to spend on digitization of the originals it's a vicious circle so that is a quick summary of why I do not think we will ever digitize everything

Channel: Bedfordshire Archives

Views: 85,533

Keywords: archives, archivist, Digitizing (Project Focus)

Id: yKNbhMCB_3g

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 28 2014