Digitiaztion Not Preservation

"Technology allows us to see things we might otherwise miss, hear things we might otherwise fail to notice, and learn from those who came before about our past, our present, and possibilities for our future."

This summer I took a class in Archives and was under the impression that digitization was a form of preservation. Because of this, I was quite surprised to read Hastings' and Lewis's assertion in Chapter 11, "Let's Get Digital", that "digitization is not preservation". I understand it now like this; that digitization is a means of providing access, but does not preserve the item itself. And those things that are 'born digital' don't need digitization, but preservation as well, so that people can access them in new formats. So the quote from the CDH is quite apropos, that technology truly allows us access to things we might never have seen. Access is one of the most important things that libraries provide. It is part of intellectual freedom which is a natural right that everyone as a rational autonomous being has. Digitization facilitates this right.
So, what institutions are practicing digitization which in turn provides better access?

Cornell University
According to the digitization blog, Cornell has apparently been a long-time partner with Microsoft and has just agreed to participate in Microsoft's Live Book Search.

The initiative will focus on works already in the public domain and allow students, researchers, and scholars to use Live Book Search to locate and read books from Cornell University Library's outstanding collections regardless of where they reside in the world. It supports both the library's long-standing commitment to make its collections broadly available and Cornell President David Skorton's goal to increase the impact of the university beyond campus boundaries.

Cornell's digital library site is quite advanced. I wanted to explore what they might be offering Microsoft and came across the Edgar Allen Poe digital exhibition. They have digitized a large portion of the collection, so that you don't have to go to Cornell to see it. There are pictures, manuscripts, playbills and newspaper entries all from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. I do not know if these manuscripts will be part of what is offered to Microsoft, but they are a brilliant example of what can be done with digitization.

Online Archive of California
As part of our activities for this unit, we were to check out the OAC. I realized I have been to this site before when I did research for my archive class paper. So this time I searched for comics, with the knowledge of the institutes's goal. I was unable to locate any online, though some were before copyright date. In this instance I imagine that the person who donated the collection may have made a formal request that they be available only in person. Their mission seems to be a working realization though. The OAC looks to develop extensive finding aids, and utilize them in a single online database. The finding aids for the objects I saw were quite extensive. They listed contents by box, and sometimes by folder.

DLCMS (digital library content management system)
I found this project to be interesting because the author of the blog is developing this content in Drupal. Drupal is significant because it is the place we upload our ePortfolios to. Mark Jordan's "goal is to develop a single Drupal module, called DLCMS, that packages up the document handlers and allows implementors to create a digital collection quickly and easily without having to perform unreasonable amounts of configuration or customization." From our other readings I know that OCLC is trying to do something similar with CONTENTdm. But what I find interesting about Jordan's project is that he is using pre-existing software, another example of 'mashing-up' two things to get one superior product. This product seems very important. The fact that there is nothing out there that everyone is using creates a large void. I wonder how many other people are trying to do this. Any archival page that I've visited seems quite limited in what it does. There is no set of rules for a finding aid, unlike the creation of a MARC record, for example. Perhaps CONTENTdm will do this. But until then it is necessary to develop programs like Jordan is doing.

Digital Library Federation
The Digital Library Federation is an organization committed to preserving digital information and helping others do the same. This reflects the missions of the digitization projects I've looked at, and the software aspect as well.

The Digital Library Federation is an international association of libraries and allied institutions. Its mission is to enable new research and scholarship of its members, students, scholars, lifelong learners, and the general public by developing an international network of digital libraries. DLF relies on collaboration, the expertise of its members, and a nimble, flexible, organizational structure to fulfill its mission.

For our wiki, my group was assigned the DLF. The DLF focuses on and helps support five aspects of digital libraries: digital collections, digital production, digital preservation, usage and users, and digital library architectures. I thought I would delve deeper into digital library architecture.
THe DLF utilizes FEDORA, a content management program. FEDORA is an open source software that gives organizations a flexible service-oriented architecture for managing and delivering their digital content. Not all the libraries affiliated with the DLF utilize FEDORA, but I can imagine how amazing it would be if they could. With one program, all the individual databases could conceivably be searched. While this venture does not do the digitization itself, it seems to be a support center and network for those that do.
Conclusion
This unit made me much more familiar with digitization techniques. After reviewing Cornell's digital imaging tutorial, I feel I have a better graspe of how to get the objects digitized. The tutorial was very well done, I liked the interactive questions. So after doing the tutorial, and our readings, I was able to better understand the projects that I learned about on the digitization blog. It's absolutely amazing how many of our library school classes intersect. In this blog alone I utilized knowledge from my ethics class, archives and all that we've learned in this, Introduction to Information Technology.