Digitization and the Future

Charlotte said...

Digitization and the Future

I wrote my paper on the digitization of books and primary sources. Part of my focus was the Library of Congress' American Memories Digitization Project, which is working on digitizing thousands of primary sources across the country. I also looked at Google's attempts to digitize the collections of several libraries in the U.S. and England. This will amount to millions of resources when they are finished.
The positives of these digitization projects outweigh the negatives, I think. They will give people access to many works that they might never have seen otherwise. Access to primary sources for students is invaluable for research assignments and for learning in general. And the attempts to digitize out-of-print and other rare books will make these resources accessible to more people.
One of the big negatives centers around copyright laws and whether these digitization projects -- or the groups behind them -- have the legal right to copy all these resources. Google is in the midst of several court cases right now, related to this very issue.
It does seem, though, that digitization is the way we are headed for many resources. It makes sense economically, as the scanning process gets easier and paper becomes scarcer and more expensive. It obviously makes sense environmentally as well. And because most of today's students are more interested in computers than textbooks, it is a trend that will probably gain in popularity even more in the near future.