Why Digitize?

Digital conversion of library materials has advanced rapidly in the past few years. It promises to continue to expand its reach and improve 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 objects, is giving form to the talk of a "library without walls." But such a virtual library has a very real price. Managers of cultural institutions 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 implications 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 digitization projects to date and to summarize what has been learned about the advantages and disadvantages of digitizing culturally significant materials. As one might expect from the early years of growth of a populär 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 provide an early assessment of the impacts of new technologies on traditional 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 collections and Services libraries have provided for decades. One such false expectation that digital conversion has already or will shortly replace microfilming äs the preferred medium for preservation reformatting could result in irreversible losses of Information. This paper seeks not to raise false alarms, but to encourage every Professional responsible for some aspect of cultural custody to assess this new technology with a hopefulness tempered by patience and informed by experience.