Why Digitize?

by Abby Smith

Council on Library and Information Resources

Washington, D.C.

February 1999
ii

Commission on Preservation and Access

The Commission on Preservation and Access, a program of the Council on Library and Information
Resources, supports the efforts of libraries and archives to save endangered portions of their paper-based
collections and to meet the new preservation challenges of the digital environment. Working with
institutions around the world, CLIR disseminates knowledge of best preservation practices and promotes
a coordinated approach to preservation activity.

Digital Libraries
The Digital Libraries program of the Council on Library and Information Resources is committed to
helping libraries of all types and sizes understand the far-reaching implications of digitization. To that
end, CLIR supports projects and publications whose purpose is to build confidence in, and increase
understanding of, the digital component that libraries are now adding to their traditional print holdings.

ISBN 1-887334-65-3

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Web site at http://www.clir.org

Additional copies are available for $15.00 from the above address. Orders must be prepaid, with checks made payable to the Council
on Library and Information Resources.

The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information
8

SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Copyright 1999 by the Council on Library and Information Resources. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transcribed
in any form without permission of the publisher. Requests for reproduction for noncommercial purposes, including educational
advancement, private study, or research will be granted. Full credit must be given to both the author and the Council on Library and
Information Resources.
 iii

Contents

Preface ....................................................................................................... iv

Authors Acknowledgments ................................................................... v

Introduction ............................................................................................... 1

What is Digital Information? .................................................................. 2

Digitization is not Preservationat Least not Yet ............................... 3

Digitization is AccessLots of It............................................................ 7

What is Gained and What is Lost? ........................................................ 11

iv

Preface

Digital conversion of library materials has advanced rapidly in the

past few years. It promises to continue to expand its reach and im-
prove its capabilities with extraordinary speed. Digitization has
proven to be possible for nearly every format and medium presently
held by libraries, from maps to manuscripts, and moving images to
musical recordings. The use of hardware and software for capturing
an item and converting it into bits and bytes, matched by a quickly
developing set of practices for describing and retrieving digital ob-
jects, is giving form to the talk of a library without walls. But such
a virtual library has a very real price. Managers of cultural institu-
tions and those responsible for policy matters related to digitization
often find themselves struggling not only to understand the new
technologies, but also, and more importantly, to grasp the implica-
tions of those technologies and to understand what digitization of
their collections means for their institution, its patrons, and the public.
This paper was written in response to discussions of digitization
at meetings of the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). NHA asked
CLIR to evaluate the experiences of cultural institutions with digiti-
zation projects to date and to summarize what has been learned
about the advantages and disadvantages of digitizing culturally sig-
nificant materials. As one might expect from the early years of
growth of a popular yet experimental technology, the lessons learned
vary greatly from one institution to another. It is risky to generalize,
but CLIR has been actively engaged in fostering the development of
digital technologies for libraries, and we feel it is important to pro-
vide an early assessment of the impacts of new technologies on tradi-
tional library roles.
What we have found is that digitization often raises expectations
of benefits, cost reductions, and efficiencies that can be illusory and,
if not viewed realistically, have the potential to put at risk the collec-
tions and services libraries have provided for decades. One such
false expectationthat digital conversion has already or will shortly
replace microfilming as the preferred medium for preservation refor-
mattingcould result in irreversible losses of information. This pa-
per seeks not to raise false alarms, but to encourage every profes-
sional responsible for some aspect of cultural custody to assess this
new technology with a hopefulness tempered by patience and in-
formed by experience.
 v

Authors Acknowledgments

For nearly a decade, first at the Library of Congress and now at

CLIR, I have worked closely with librarians and curators charged
with converting the riches of their institutions holdings into digital
form. Being able to look over their shoulders as they have gone
about the daunting tasks of sorting through tough intellectual issues,
while simultaneously meeting technological challenges, has deeply
informed my thinking about possibilities and limitations, both hu-
man and technological. In their conversations with me, they have
been generous with their time and helpful in their candor, and I am
grateful to them. I owe a special debt to three who read this paper
and offered many insights and improvements: Anne Kenney of Cor-
nell University Library; Barclay Ogden of the Main Library at the
University of California, Berkeley; and Donald Waters of the Digital
Library Federation. While they may not agree with everything writ-
ten here, their perspectives on a number of issues were invaluable to
me and I thank them.

Abby Smith
Director of Programs
 Why Digitize? 1

The dream of the virtual library comes forward

now not because it promises an exciting future,

but because it promises a future that will be just

like the past, only better and faster.

James J. ODonnell, Avatars of the Word

I
Introduction n the digital world, all knowledge is divided into two parts. The
binary strings of 0s and 1s that make up the genetic code of
data allow information to be fruitful and multiply, and allow
people to create, manipulate, and share data in ways that appear
to be revolutionary. It is often said that digital information is trans-
forming the way we learn, the way we communicate, even the way
we think. It is also changing the way that libraries and archives not
only work, but, more fundamentally, the very work that they do. It is
easy to overstateand underestimatethe transformative power of
a new technology, especially when we do not yet understand the full
implications of its many applications. Nonetheless, people have em-
braced this technology enthusiastically, often as an answer to ques-
tions that had not, in many cases, yet been posed. Librarians every-
where hear the voices of people speaking like evangelicals, urging
the conversion of text and visual materials into digital form as if con-
version per se were a self-evident good. But because we tend to
imagine the future in terms of the present, as ODonnell points out,
such projections of the present onto the future may, at best, be mis-
leading. If this new technology does, indeed, turn out to be revolu-
tionary, then we cannot anticipate its impact in full, and we should
be cautious about letting the radiance of the bright future blind us to
its limitations.
While we may not yet fully understand the ways in which this
technology will and will not change libraries, we can already discern
some simple, yet profoundly important, patterns in digital applica-
tions that presage their effective and creative use in the traditional
library functions of collecting, preserving, and making information
accessible. A critical mass of experience is accumulating among li-
braries and archives active in digitizing parts of their collections,
ranging in size from the Library of Congress, the National Archives,
and major research libraries in the Digital Library Federation, to
smaller institutions such as the Huntington and Denver Public li-
braries. Their experiences reveal patterns that can help us assess
when the technology is able to meet expectations for improvement of
2 Why Digitize?

traditional library services, when it cannot, and when it may do so,

but not in a cost-effective manner. This paper will address the ques-
tion of why a library should invest in the conversion of its traditional
materials into digital formin other words, what are the advantages
and disadvantages of converting traditional analog materials into
digital form.

What is Until very recently, all recorded information was analogthat is, a
continuous stream of information of varying density and type. Ana-
Digital
log information can range from the subtle tones and gradations of
Information? the chiaroscuro in a Berenice Abbott photograph of Manhattan in
early morning light, to the changes in volume, tone, and pitch re-
corded on a tape that might, when played back on equipment, turn
out to be the basement tapes of Bob Dylan or the Welsh accents of
Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood. But when such information
is fed into a computer, broken up into 0s and 1s and put together in a
binary code, its character is changed in quite precise ways.
Digitally encoded data do not represent the infinitely variable
nature of information as faithfully as analog forms of recording. Dig-
its are assigned numeric values which are fixed, so that great preci-
sion is gained in lieu of the infinitesimal gradations that carry mean-
ing in analog forms. For example, when a photograph is digitized for
viewing on a computer screen, the original continuous tone image is
divided into dots with assigned values that are mapped against a
grid. The pattern of the dots is remembered and reassembled by the
computer upon command.
Those bits of data can be recombined for easy manipulation and
compressed for storage. Voluminous encyclopedias that take up
yards of shelf space in analog form can fit onto a minuscule space on
a computer drive, and that same digital encyclopedia can be
searched in many ways other than alphabetically, making possible
information retrieval that would have been unimaginable if one had
only the analog copy, on paper or microfilm.
Data that are not being used are not like books on a shelf or the
family correspondence and photos stored in shoe boxes at the back
of a closet. They are more like the stacks of LPs or the 8mm family
home movies in storage in a basement. That is, digital information is
not eye-legible: it is dependent on a machine to decode and re-
present the bit streams in images on a computer screen. Without that
machine, and without active human intervention, those data will not
last.
 Why Digitize? 3

One of the most important qualities of information in digital

form is that by its very nature it is not fixed in the way that texts
printed on a paper are. Digital texts are neither final nor finite, and
are fixed neither in essence nor in form except when a hard copy is
printed out, for they can be changed easily and without trace of era-
sures or emendations. Flexibility is one of the chief assets of digital
information and is precisely what we like about text poured into a
word processing program. It is easy to edit, to reformat, and to com-
mit to print in a variety of iterations without the effort required to
produce hard copy from a typewriter. That is why visual designers
like computer-assisted design programs. It is easy to summon up
quickly any number of variations of value, hue, shape, and place-
ment to see, rather than to imagine, what different visual options
look like. Furthermore, we can create an endless number of identical
copies from a digital file, because the file does not decay by virtue of
copying.
From the creators point of view this kind of plasticity may be
ideal, but from the perspective of a library or archives that endeavors
to collect a text that is final and in one sense or another definitive, it
can complicate things considerably. Because the digital text is flexible
and easily changed, the matter of preserving digital information be-
comes conceptually problematic. Which version of the file, or how
many versions, should be archived? There are also formidable tech-
nical obstacles to ensuring the persistence of digital information.

Digitization All recorded information, from the paintings on the walls of caves
and drawings in the sand, to clay tablets and videotaped speeches,
is not
has value, even if temporary, or it would not have been recorded to
Preservation begin with. That which the creator or transcriber deems to be of en-
during value is written on a more or less durable medium and en-
at Least not Yet
trusted to the care of responsible custodians. Other bits of recorded
information, like laundry lists and tax returns, are created to serve a
temporary purpose and are allowed to vanish. Libraries and archives
were created to collect and make available that which has long-term
value. And libraries and archives serve not only to safeguard that
information, but also to provide evidence of one type or another of
the works provenance, which goes towards establishing the authen-
ticity of that work.
Though digitization is sometimes loosely referred to as preserva-
tion, it is clear that, so far, digital resources are at their best when fa-
cilitating access to information and weakest when assigned the tradi-
tional library responsibility of preservation. Regrettably, because
4 Why Digitize?

digitization is a type of reformatting, like microfilming, it is often

confused with preservation microfilming and seen as a superior, if as
yet more expensive, form of preservation reformatting. Digital imag-
ing is not preservation, however. Much is gained by digitizing, but
permanence and authenticity, at this juncture of technological devel-
opment, are not among those gains.
The reasons for the weakness of digitization as a preservation
treatment are complex. Microfilm, the preservation reformatting me-
dium of choice, is projected to last several centuries when made on
silver halide film and kept in a stable environment. It requires only a
lens and a light to read, unlike computer files, which require hard-
ware and software, both of which are developed in often proprietary
forms that quickly become obsolete, rendering information on them
inaccessible. At present, the retrieval of information encoded in an
obsolete file format and stored on an obsolete medium (such as 8-
inch floppy diskettes) is extremely expensive and labor-intensive,
when at all possible. Often the medium on which digital information
is recorded is itself inherently unstable. Magnetic tape is one exam-
ple of a common digital medium that requires special care and han-
dling and has been known to degrade within a decade, beyond the
point where information can be recovered. Magnetic forms of analog
recording, such as video and audio tape, are equally fragile and un-
reliable for long-term storage. In its inherent physical fragility, mag-
netic tape is not different in essence from the acid paper so widely
produced in the last 150 years, but its life span is often dramatically
shorter than that of poor quality paper.
More important even than the durability of the medium is the
need to keep the data fresh and encoded in readable file formats. On-
going investigations into two possible ways of ensuring data persis-
tencethe migration of data from one software and hardware con-
figuration to a more current one, and the creation of software that
emulates obsolete encoding formatsmay develop solutions to this
problem. As yet, we have no tested and reliable technique for ensur-
ing continued access to digital data of enduring value, although in-
formation stored on nonproprietary formats such as ASCII has been
migrated successfully (in the case, for example, of specific govern-
ment records). Nevertheless, migration from one software to another
does not produce a new file exactly identical to the old one. Though
data loss may not necessarily mean loss of intellectual content, the
file has been changed.
Another reason that preservation goals are in some fundamental
way challenged by digital imaging is that it is quite difficult to ascer-
tain the authenticity and integrity of an image, database, or text
when it is in digital form. How can one tell if a digital file has been
 Why Digitize? 5

tampered with and the content changed or falsified? Looked at from

the traditional perspective of published or manuscript materials, it is
futile even to try: there is no original with which to compare a sus-
pect file. Copies can be deceptively faithful: one cannot tell the differ-
ence between the original output of a scan of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, and one that is output four months later. In contravention
of a core principle of archival authenticity, one can change the bit
stream of a file and leave no record of its having been altered. There
is much research and development being dedicated to solving the
dilemma posed by the stunning fidelity of digital cloning, including
methods for marking images and time-stamping them, but as yet
there is no solution.
Authenticity may not be important for a digital image of a well-
known document like the Declaration of Independence, in which ac-
cess to either the analog original or a good photographic image is
easy enough to obtain for comparisons sake. But anyone who has
seen the digitally engineered commercial in which Fred Astaire can
be seen dancing with a vacuum cleaner can readily understand the
ease with which improbable digital occurrences can become real be-
cause we can be made to see them. After all, the evidence is before
our eyes, and our eyes cannot detect a falsehood. It is our cognitive
reasoning that detects that falsehood, not our eyes. That image of the
suave, gliding across the floor with the functional, startles and amus-
es us because it confounds our expectations.
But what if we arrive at a library Web site, for example, looking
for an image that we have never seen and about which we have few
expectations. The only reason that we expect that image to be a
truthful representative of the original is that we can rely on the integ-
rity of the institution that has mounted the files and makes them
available to us. We transfer the confidence we experience in the read-
ing room of that library to our work station, wherever it may be. We
go to the New York Public Library Web site with the full expectation
that the library guarantees the integrity of the images they mount.
But it would be very hard indeed for a researcher in Alaska looking
at New York Public Librarys Digital Schomburg site to verify inde-
pendently that any given image is indeed a faithful representation of
the original.
The problem of authenticity is far from unique to the digital
realm. Forgers and impostors have a distinguished history of operat-
ing successfully and often long undetected in print and photographic
media, although they have had to work harder and smarter than
their digital counterparts. The traditional methods for authenticating
documents that have served the library and archival professions well
until now have relied largely on practices derived from markers car-
6 Why Digitize?

ried on the physical medium itself. After a textual examination to

look for obvious differences in content, researchers have often then
examined the physical carrier itselfthe book or manuscript leafto
see if there are any signs of modification or falsification. From a sim-
ple examination of watermarks to a variety of sophisticated chemi-
cal, optical, and physical tests that can verify the age of paper, the
composition of inks, and the physical traces of erasures and palimp-
sests, researchers have resorted to a number of strategies to verify
the authenticity of a document. Granted, there are few who routinely
insist on that level of authentication in doing research, but that is be-
cause the pitfalls of using books, manuscripts, and visual materials
are familiar to us and we tend to discount them without much con-
scious thought. We should be wary of reposing the same quality of
trust in digital resources that we do in print and photographic media
until we are equally familiar with their evidentiary weaknesses.
As in other forms of reformatting, digital scanning has implica-
tions for the original item and its physical integrity. Depending on
the policy of a library or archival institution, the original of a
scanned item may or may not be retained after reformatting. To the
extent that a reader can make do without handling the original, the
digital preservation surrogate can serve to protect it from wear and
tear. If there is concern that the scanning process could damage ma-
terials, one would choose to scan a film version of the original.
The advantages of scanning for access purposes may be com-
bined with those of preservation microfilming by using the model of
hybrid conversion, that is, creating preservation-standard microfilm
and scanning it for digital access purposes, or, conversely, beginning
with a high-quality scan of the original and creating computer-out-
put microfilm (COM) for preservation purposes. Work is presently
underway to articulate and refine best practices for implementing
the hybrid approach to reformatting so that it can be adopted by li-
braries across the country. Of course COM, unlike microfilm created
from the original, is only a recording of digital images on an analog
medium. Though it has been fixed on a durable medium, some
would argue that the image itself, having been generated digitally,
has lost some essential informationor has at least lost its funda-
mental analog characterand cannot therefore claim to be as desir-
able for preservation as film made by photographing the original
source.
Although this may seem a minor point to those more interested
in easy access than in that level of authenticity, it is still important to
understand that digital technology transforms analog information
radically. There has to be some loss of information when an analog
item is made digital, just as there is when one analog copy is made
 Why Digitize? 7

from another. On the other hand, there is virtually no loss of infor-

mation from one generation of a digital copy to another. Images will
not degrade when copied, in contrast to microfilm, which loses about
10 percent of its information with each copy. Once there is more than
one copy of a digital file, it is impossible to pick out the original, and
one will never speak of vintage files the way that one now speaks
of vintage photographs. On the other hand, digital images are less
likely to decay in storage if they are refreshed, the images will not
degrade when copied, and the digital files will not decay in use, un-
like paper, film, and magnetic tape.

Digitization Digital files can provide extraordinary access to information. They

can make the remote accessible and the hard to see visible. Digital
is
surrogates can bring together research materials that are widely scat-
Access tered about the globe, allowing viewers to conflate collections and
compare items that can be examined side by side solely by virtue of
Lots of It
digital representation. The easy access to reference surrogatesim-
ages that provide a great deal of the information contained in the
original, even if at fairly low resolutionis a boon to researchers
when developing efficient and effective research strategies. Through
the use of thumbnail images, which do not require high resolution,
one can at a minimum acquaint oneself with the source enough to
know whether or not one needs to consult the original. Very often
one can make do with the digital surrogate because it provides all
the information required. An image of the 1612 map of Virginia by
John Smith may provide a scholar enough information to determine
how far inland Smith actually traveled. The black crosses he laid
down on paper to mark the furthest points he reached on various
treks are clearly legible even on a low-resolution image.
One must think about the nature of the source materials (color,
black and white, or shades of gray) and the use of the images (who
will be consulting them and for what) when making decisions about
the parameters for image capture. The quality and utility of an image
depend upon the technology of capture and display, and the useful-
ness of an image, even if only for reference, can be severely compro-
mised by a low-resolution monitor on which the image will be dis-
played. While work is ongoing to address the quality control and
variability of computer monitors, as yet the lack of control over dis-
play mechanisms constitutes one of the weakest links in the digital
chain of transmission.
Image processingthe manipulation of images after initial digi-
tal capturecan greatly expand the capacity of the researcher to
8 Why Digitize?

compare and contrast details that the human eye cannot see unaided.
Images can be enhanced in size, sharpness of detail, and color con-
trast. Through image processing, a badly faded document can be
read more easily, dirty images can be cleaned up, and faint pencil
marks can be made legible. The plan of the District of Columbia pre-
pared by Pierre-Charles LEnfant for George Washington in 1791 is so
badly faded, discolored, and brittle that it resembles a potato chip. It
cannot be used by researchers and yields little detailed information
to the unaided eye. Digitized several years ago, the map now can be
displayed to allow us to make out all the subtle contours of the archi-
tects plan and to read the numerous annotations made by Thomas
Jefferson. Like successful archaeologists, we have, with our digital
picks and brushes, excavated important historical evidence that has
changed the way we understand the planning of the nations capital.
Digital technology can also make available powerful teaching
materials for students who would not otherwise have access to them.
Among the most valuable types of materials to digitize from a class-
room perspective are those from the special collections of research
institutions, including rare books, manuscripts, musical scores and
performances, photographs and graphic materials, and moving im-
ages. Often these items are extremely rare, fragile, or, in fact, unique,
and gaining access to them is very difficult. Digitizing these types of
primary source materials offers teachers at all levels previously un-
heard-of opportunities to expose their students to the raw materials
of history. The richness of special collections as research tools lies in
part in the representation of an event or phenomenon in many differ-
ent formats. The chance to study the presidential election of 1860 by
looking at digital images of daguerreotypes of the candidates, politi-
cal campaign posters (a recent innovation of the time), cartoons from
contemporary newspapers, abolitionist broadsides and notices of
slave auctions, and the manuscript of Lincolns inaugural address in
draft form reflecting several different stages of compositionsuch
an opportunity would be possible with a well-developed plan of dig-
ital conversion of materials from different repositories normally be-
yond the reach of students.
While we know, for example, that the daily number of hits at the
Library of Congress American Memory site is greater than the num-
ber of readers who visit the librarys reading rooms each day, we
have very little data now as to how much these types of online imag-
es are used and for what purposes. Some large libraries are attempt-
ing to compile and analyze use statistics, but this labor-intensive task
presents quite a challenge. We need more user studies before we can
assert confidently what may seem self-evident to us now: that add-
ing digitized special collections to the mass of information available
 Why Digitize? 9

on the Internet is in the public interest and enhances education. We

also need to ensure that libraries are working collaboratively in their
efforts to digitize materials so that together they create a critical mass
of research sources that are complementary and not duplicative, and
that begin to fulfill the promise of coordinated digital collection
building. However, at present there is no central source of informa-
tion about what has been digitized, and with what care in the pro-
cess, as there is for titles that have been microfilmed for preservation.
Some of the drawbacks of digital technology for access, as for
preservation, stem from the technologys uncanny ability to repre-
sent the original in a seemingly authentic way. Working with digital
surrogates can distort the research experience somewhat by taking
research materials out of the context of the reading room. The nature
of computer display makes only serial viewing possible, very differ-
ent indeed, for example, from spreading photographs in their origi-
nal sizes around a flat surface and looking at them simultaneously
and in different groupings. Every object, every page, is mediated by
the screen, which automatically flattens and decontextualizes the im-
ages. And a digital image, no matter how high the resolution and
sensitive the display monitor, is always presented through the rela-
tively low density of information of the computer screen, compro-
mising the high-density nature of analog materials, which can be
critical for assessing some visual evidence.
Digital raw materials on the Web are not as raw as they might
appear to be. Many of the items that may be viewed now on the Web
sites of such institutions as the National Archives, the Library of
Congress, and the New York Public Library, come from special col-
lections that are large, often cataloged only at the collection level,
and often unedited, with few descriptions that aid a scholar. In order
to digitize them, curators familiar with the materials sift through col-
lections and make selections from them. The amount of physical
preparation and intellectual control work that is needed for every
digital project is very large indeed. Scanning is a very expensive pro-
cess, and most of the cost occurs before the item is laid on the scan-
ner. Part of that cost is the physical preparation of, research into, and
description of an item. A collection of daguerreotypes that may have
been in reasonably good physical condition but not very well cata-
loged may undergo extensive conservation review and treatment be-
fore it is scanned, and labor-intensive searches into the identities of
faces that have been anonymous for decades may precede the cata-
loging and description of the digitized images. While these searches
may be viewed as extraneous, or at least discretionary, editorial ex-
penses, in fact they are more commonly incurred than not. The col-
lections that are on the Web are, in a real sense, publications, accom-
10 Why Digitize?

panied as they are by a great deal of descriptive information created

in order to make the items understandable in the context of the Internet.
The users of library Web sites need this information. Because
they are used to having a reference librarian available to help them
in their searches when they are at a library, they often want a library
site to provide comparable reference and searching functions. They
expect higher levels of functionality of digital objects than they do of
library materials, in part because there is no online equivalent to a
reference specialist available.
Despite the high cost of digital conversion, many institutions are
taking on ambitious projects in order to find out for themselves what
the technology can do for them. They are investing large amounts of
money in projects to make their collections more accessible and, too
often, believing that they are also accomplishing preservation goals
at the same time. The impact of digitizing projects on an institution,
its way of operating, its traditional audience, and its core functions,
is often hard to anticipate. The challenge of selecting the parts of a
large collection that will be scanned is, for some, a novel task that
calls into question basic principles of collection development and ac-
cess policies. Many libraries and archives have collections that are
intrinsically valuable by virtue of being comprehensive and contain-
ing much information that is essentially unpublished. But they also
may contain sensitive materials, those that deal with historical
events or previously popular attitudes that may be offensive to us
now and that must be understood in the larger context, and this is
precisely what a comprehensive collection providescontext.
How does one deal with sensitive materials in a networked envi-
ronment? Making information available on the Internet removes the
very barriers from use that we take for granted in physical collec-
tions. No one has to travel to a library, nor do they have to present
proof of their serious research interest in order to gain access to com-
plex, disturbing, and uninterpreted material. On the other hand, if
one makes the difficult decision to edit out materials that are readily
served in a reading room, but are too powerful to broadcast on the
Internet, what does that do to the integrity of a research collection?
There are ways to build in electronic barriers to access for all or por-
tions of a site, using much the same technology that commercial enti-
ties use in granting fee-based access. However, constructing these
barriers adds a layer of administrative complexity to managing the
site that libraries and archives may not be prepared to take on, even
if the technology does exist. Only when digitization is viewed specif-
ically as a form of publishing, and not simply as another way to
make resources available to researchers, are the thornier issues of se-
lection for conversion put into an editorial context that provides a
 Why Digitize? 11

strong intellectual and ethical basis for imaginative selection of com-

plex materials.
Many of the collections that may be of the highest research and
teaching value will not be digitized for Web access because of the
strictures of copyright that might apply. For this reason, library Web
sites these days contain a disproportionate amount of public domain
material, which distorts the nature of the source base for research re-
stricted to the Web. The notion on the part of many young students
that, if it is not on the Web or in an online catalog, then it must not
exist, has the effect of orphaning the vast majority of information re-
sources, especially those that are not in the public domain. This is not
what the Framers had in mind when they wrote the copyright code
into the Constitution, to promote the Progress of Science and useful
Arts. This skewed representation of created works on the Web will
continue for quite some time into the future, and the complications
that surround moving image and recorded sound rights means, iron-
ically, that these will be the least accessible resources on the most dy-
namic information source around. And until Optical Character Rec-
ognition (OCR), the post-processing technology that makes scanned
text searchable, works as well for scripts using non-Latin characters
as for those using Latin ones, resources from around the world in
vernacular languages will not take their proper place in the scanning
queue.

What is Gained In contemplating a digital conversion project, an institution must ask

itself what can be gained from digitization, and whether the value
and
added is worth the price. Many libraries have begun the difficult
What is Lost task of developing criteria for selecting for digitization and have
published their criteria on the Internet. Columbia University, for ex-
ample, was among the first to post guidelines for selection of materi-
als for digital conversion, which include the criterion of added value
(available from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/
criteria.htm). They define the added value of digital capture as
enhanced intellectual control through creation of new finding aids,
links to bibliographic records, and development of indices and oth-
er tools;
increased and enriched use through the ability to search widely,
manipulating images and text, and to study disparate images in
new contexts;
encouragement of new scholarly use through the provision of en-
hanced resources in the form of widespread dissemination of local
or unique collections;
12 Why Digitize?

enhanced use through improved quality of image, for example,

improved legibility of faded or stained documents; and
creation of a virtual collection through the flexible integration
and synthesis of a variety of formats, or of related materials scat-
tered among many locations.
At present, however, the cost of digitization and of creating and
maintaining a migration path for preserving the files is very expen-
sive. The benefits of making an underused collection more accessible
should be viewed in conjunction with other factors such as compati-
bility with other digital resources and the collections intrinsic intel-
lectual value. As the Society of American Archivists has said, The
mere potential for increased access to a digitized collection does not
add value to an underutilized collection. It is a rare collection of digi-
tal files indeed that can justify the cost of a comprehensive migration
strategy without factoring in the larger intellectual context of related
digital files stored everywhere and their combined uses for research
and scholarship. (Available from http://www.archivists.org/gover-
nance/resolutions/digitize.html.)
As Donald Waters of the Digital Library Federation has ex-
pressed it, the promise of digital technology is for libraries to extend the
reach of research and education, improve the quality of learning, and re-
shape scholarly communication. This is not an extravagant claim for the
technology, but rather a declaration of an ambition shared by many
who are developing and managing the technology. And the key to
fulfilling that promise lies within the communities of higher educa-
tion, science, and public policy responsible for applying digital tech-
nology to those ends. Digital conversion of library holdings has its
stake in this ambition, particularly to the extent that it can broaden
access to valuable but scarce resources. But the cost of conversion
and the institutional commitment to keeping those converted materi-
als refreshed and accessible for the long-term is highprecisely how
high, we do not knowand libraries must also ensure the longevity
of information that is created in digital form and exists in no other
form. We need more information about what imaging projects cost,
and about who uses those converted materials and how they use
them, in order to judge whether the investment is worth it. In the
meantime, libraries must continue to be responsible custodians of
their analog holdings, the print, image and sound recording collec-
tions that are their core assets and the legacy of many generations.
This task requires continuing use of tried-and-true preservation tech-
niques such as microfilming to ensure the longevity of imperiled in-
formation.
Analog is a different way of knowing than digital, and each has
its intrinsic virtues and limitations. Digital will not and cannot re-
 Why Digitize? 13

place analog. To convert everything to digital form would be wrong-

headed, even if we could do it. The real challenge is how to make
those analog materials more accessible using the powerful tool of
digital technology, not only through conversion, but also through
digital finding aids and linked databases of search tools. Digital tech-
nology can, indeed, prove to be a valuable instrument to enhance
learning and extend the reach of information resources to those who
seek them, wherever they are, but only if we develop it as an addi-
tion to an already well-stocked tool kit, rather than a replacement for
all of those tools which generations before us have ingeniously craft-
ed and passed on to us in trust.