Digitization

Well, I'm not sure how to tie all of this week's materials together. Clearly, the video on Kindles didn't have the material in it that was expected when it was chosen (I think back to the article on Party Girl, when we were told that that article had very little to do with the topic for the week, even though it had all of the keywords we were looking for. I think this video is very similar, that it has all the right keywords, but still doesn't fit with the topic.). While accessibility is certainly an issue in libraries, I would hardly consider it as a subfield of "digitization". If anything, ereaders enable more readers to access texts, by allowing them to zoom in on the text (with limited capacity, of course, as I've seen from my own trouble zooming in on certain scanned images). However, the video focused only on the negative, that somehow ereaders don't accommodate those with disabilities. I still don't know how that's the case, but whatever. As I said, this clearly wasn't the content that was expected from the title, and as such, I don't feel like wasting more of my time discussing it on top of the hour and fifteen minutes of my life that I won't get back after listening to it. At least I was able to watch Wisconsin win a share of the Big Ten title while I was listening to it.

So now, to instead talk about the video that was more applicable to this week's topic. This video was mostly interesting to me because it crossed over significantly into the topics covered in LIS 644, Digital Tools, Trends, and Debate. Recently, we have been discussing digital preservation, which is a huge issue in libraries today, involving a broad range of topics: physical preservation (not letting CDs get scratched), format preservation (doc vs. docx file types, as a very simple example), data integrity (including topics like lossy vs. lossless compression, as well as making sure no ones and zeros get flipped in the binary coding of a file), and huge number of other issues. Some of these issues apply with physical materials as well, in particular that of physical preservation. Interestingly, digital formats can even face some of the same problems as physical formats in the face of malicious users: it's very easy to destroy a book, and in the hands of someone good with computers, it's also very easy to destroy a digital copy of something.

Another topic that I wanted to mention was that of eresources. The speaker in the video mentioned that we have adopted eresources very quickly. But what he doesn't say is that we haven't had a choice! Quite often, publishers realize that it's cheaper to issue digital copies of a journal than it is to print one, so they change to a digital-only format; subscribers have no choice but to adapt. The speaker does mention that we haven't had a choice but to license many titles, rather than purchasing them, but he still makes it sound like we've been on the cutting edge of eresources. True or not, it's only because we've had our hands forced, and we've basically been given a sink-or-swim option.

To put my own spin on things, digitization is a good idea. Digital formats can be at least as long-lasting as paper formats with the proper care, which may involve frequent (every few years or so) transition from an older file format to a newer one. Then again, that sounds like a possibility for paper copies, too, but the cost of making new digital formats is significantly lower than that for making new paper copies. The challenge facing us nowadays is coming up with new ways of describing these digital formats (metadata), so long as we also make sure that we're not letting files degrade or letting formats go extinct (think of 5 1/4" floppy disks).