History Digitized
There’s an interesting article in Saturday’s (10 Mar 2007) New York Times by Katie Hafner titled History, Digitized (and Abridged). The article talks about how the challenges of digitizing history and how many of the historic collections and documents are not available on the Web, nor may they ever be.
As we become more and more accustomed to being able to locate the information we want on the Internet, many valuable artifacts and documents will be overlooked simply because they aren’t accessible via the Web. Edward L. Ayers, an historian interviewed for the piece says,
“Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users.”
So what about your historical collections and documents?
Have you thought about scanning all of the vital records you have collected over the years? How about photographing other items you have collected in conjunction with your research? While there will never be a true replacement for the original for any particular item, we should take whatever steps we have at our disposal to scan/photograph/video/record/document the items we have collected over time.
Otherwise, we may end up doing what other historians in the article say is happening in their efforts, we’re leaving holes in our history.