Readings 7

Readings 7, Paper 1

Smith, Abby. (1999). Why Digitize? Washington, DC: Council on Library & Information Resources. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub80.html

Publication Information:

It was published in 1999.
Abby Smith is the director of programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources.
It was a report by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Take-aways:

Digital information is different from analog information.
Information is lost when it is digitized.
Digitization is not the same as preservation--computer technology is not reliable, and formats change.
Search and retrieval is much easier with digital information.
Moving to digital is a tradeoff.

Questions:

Should libraries keep a digital and a physical copy of materials?
How should libraries handle things that are "born-digital"? Should they make physical copies?
What should be done to balance the tradeoffs between digital and analog mediums?
Will the practice of storing physical backups go away as the technology cycle gets slower?

Anne Kenny, Oya Rieger, Richard Entlich. Digital Imaging Tutorial. Cornell University Library, 2003.

Publication Information:

It was published in 2003.
The authors work at Cornell, and the work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
It is a webpage that was published on the Cornell Library website.

Take-aways:

The article discusses several basic terms for digitizing images.

They use examples to compare various image processing techniques.

There are techniques for dealing with damaged documents.

Getting color and lighting correct is challenging.

Questions:

Which is more important: faithfulness to the original document or legibility?

Is it better to compress a high-resolution scan or keep a low-resolution scan with loseless compression?

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