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Digitization: The Future is Now
By Kay Schlumpf, NSLS
April 30, 2007
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Digitization: a word that's frequently in the news as of late. But, what does that mean and why should you care? You'll find people using it interchangeably with “scanning” but the term digitization is not limited to scanning alone. Digitization means to take a physical item and turn it into a computer-readable format. That means you can have digitization of photographs, books, audio recordings, video recordings, etc. It does not mean that you need to use a scanner; digitization can also be accomplished by something as simple as a person typing in the text from a printed book–such as how Project Gutenberg started in 1971–and how transcriptions of handwritten materials are created.

What path you take depends on the materials you wish to convert.

Digitizing is important to libraries.

There are many, many reasons why digitizing is important, but some here are some that top the list:

• Access. Documents are available to your patrons whether or not the library is open and whether or not they can come in.
• Worldwide Exposure. Researchers are in every corner of the world and many have no idea you have what you have.
• Preservation. Protect your materials from handling and destruction. No more cut out pages in the high school yearbooks, missing maps, or ripped corners.
• Disaster Planning. Keep digitized copies in an off-site storage area.
• Increased Traffic. Draw more people into your library through curiosity.
• Partnering Possibilities. Many of our Digital Past participants have developed relationships with other local cultural institutions through digitization.

The wave of the future is here now.

Are you going to catch the digitization wave now or scramble to catch up later? Take a look at what's out there; not only local history digitization projects but book digitization projects.

Google Book Search Project
Google is already digitizing thousands of books from 13 international institutions through their Google Book Search Project. Most of the institutions are universities, with a few national libraries, and the New York Public Library as well.

Open Content Alliance
With all the publicity Google has garnered, you might think they are the only ones doing such work in the world today. This, however, is entirely untrue. Another equally powerful, but much quieter group is the Open Content Alliance (OCA) which is backed by the Internet Archive, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Adobe. There are approximately 50 international institutions on their partners list, including not only universities, but museums, corporations, and botanical gardens as well. Yet, these two groups are not mutually exclusive; you can belong to both, for example, the University of California is on both lists.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg was created“to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks” and they've grown to one of the largest collections of such.

"Making of America" Project
The University of Michigan was another early adapter with their “Making of America” project, described as “a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.”

Digital Past
Here at North Suburban Library System we started Digital Past, a local history digitization project in 1998 with 15 member libraries. At that time we focused on materials that could be scanned on flatbed scanners which included photographs, letters, phone books, and one creative library even managed to digitize a beer can. Nine years later, we now have 34 “primary” participants who partner with close to that many other institutions to provide the nearly 55,000 items available in Digital Past. We've also expanded to include other formats such as oral histories and videos.

As technology changes, we try our best to keep up and to provide what our participants need in the way of software, support, training, and more specialized equipment available in our Lab. For example, right now we are looking into ways of helping our members digitize some of the more difficult items like newspapers and bound materials.

Digitization projects are not just for genealogists and historians.

You may be surprised to learn that digitizing is used by colleges and universities for reserves and reprinting of damaged books, as well as by TV producers, magazine editors, authors, school children, and many others. If you are worried about someone using your items without permission, here at Digital Past, we only offer lower resolution files suitable for viewing on a computer monitor and printing out on a home computer. To be used commercially, higher resolution files are required and are only available upon request of the holding institution.

Should digitization be on your horizon?

I certainly think so and I hope that maybe I've convinced you to at least look into it. I'd love to hear from you on what you are considering digitizing and where you may need help. If you want to read more, the March issue of Computers in Libraries focused on digitization and there are several good blogs and listservs out there as well. Or, feel free to contact me at NSLS.

About the Author

Kay Schlumpf is the Digital Past coordinator and serves as the liaison for the genealogy and local history networking group.

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