Exploring

Digitization

Many collections managers, particularly those in small institutions, have been confronted with a member of the board of trustees who asks: "Why don't we just buy a scanner? Then we wouldn't have to worry about preservation."

The short answer to this question is that while digitization (the conversion of analog data into machine-readable binary code) is an excellent tool for researcher access, it cannot yet stand on its own as a viable preservation reformatting strategy, particularly for small institutions with limited resources. For the future, the preservation community envisions a gradual partnership between preservation microfilm and the evolving technology of digital imaging.

Digital scanners and cameras are ubiquitous, however, and numerous digital initiatives, on varying scales and with varying goals, are occurring in cultural institutions. Given the presence of digitization within the cultural community, it makes sense to look in more detail at the major issues involved in digitizing collections to see what can be learned from existing digitization efforts.

Key challenges of digital preservation include:

• creating digital objects worthy of the effort and expense required to preserve them;
• creating effective systems for accessing the digitized images; and
• dealing with the problem of rapid obsolescence of the hardware and software that support those access systems.