Will digitization save old knowledge products?
June 2001
Conventional wisdom says our old knowledge products are endangered: over time newspapers turn to dust, photographs crumble, and book pages become too brittle to turn. How to save them? Microfilm was a first-generation solution, digitization the latest. Bob Huggins, President of Cold North Wind, not only has a plan, he claims that digitized versions of historic newspapers will be “the next wave of content” on the Net (Ottawa Citizen, June 12). His young company, which is in the vanguard of this rescue mission, will put 500 million pages of old newspapers on the Net.
Digitization of old knowledge products seems almost too good to be true: new technology promises to save these disappearing resources, offers researchers easy access to information (and no more motion sickness from scrolling through microfilm), and gives publishers the chance to generate new revenues from old news. But is digitization of archival collections the boon it seems? The transfer of original materials into new mediums is causing debates, not just about the benefits of working from original documents but about the value of retaining original documents for safekeeping and future copying.
On April 15 New York Times reported on the future of the Bettmann Archive, a collection of 17 million photographs which combine the works of famous German-American photographer Otto Bettmann as well as the photographic library of UPI (Sarah Boxer, “A Century’s Photo History Destined for a Life in a Mine”). This massive resource, lauded as a visual history of the 20th century, is now owned by Corbis, a company owned by Bill Gates.
Corbis wants to preserve the delicate originals, but its plan – to store the collection in a rural underground mine instead of in New York City – makes the collection rather inaccessible. This isn’t just Corbis’s practice: many similar collections are being sent to off-site storage facilities for sakekeeping. To make them accessible, the Archive is being digitized, but the process is slow. At present, Corbis’s digital archive amounts to only 2% of the entire collection and the entire archive won’t be digitized for at least 25 years.
For some, providing such limited access to these collections is a monopolistic act with potentially negative consequences: newspapers, magazines, and books will end up reprinting the same images over and over again. For others, the very act of digitizing historical materials is problematic: being able to look at and hold an original document has a magical quality. In both cases, critics claim, the result is the same: our understanding of the past is diminished.
This is the very concern of Nicholson Baker, whose book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001) vilifies the keepers of another valued knowledge resource. Baker accuses senior library managers in Britain and the United States for being so grotesquely inept that they couldn’t plan for the inevitable growth of their newspaper collections, “the single most important hoard of human knowledge in the country.”
Librarians have long had a misguided obsession with space saving. Our society’s knowledge product output is, of course, relentless. As more and more product floods libraries, shelf space has become scarce. Miniaturization has seemed an obvious answer. And librarians soon discovered that by creating a myth about the fragility of paper, especially newsprint, they were able to use federal funds to create extensive microfilm collections. With film in-hand, they either threw away or sold to dealers the original newspapers.
Unfortunately, many supposedly “complete” microfilm editions are actually incomplete, and poor copying has rendered a great deal of text and images indecipherable. Because the originals were not kept, all that now remains of many big-city American dailies are these poor-quality microfilm collections stamped “best copy available.” As we develop newer technologies – digitization, and its successors – the absence of the original documents will come back to haunt us.
Baker laments “the methodical eradication of so much primary-source material.” What is the value of an original document? As with old photographs, old newspapers provide not just the content, but also “the texture” of historical writing. Subtle changes in texture mean we lose in specificity and groundedness; other times the loss of content means we miss something more important. For example, Baker refers to a controversial off-the-record comment then-president Richard Nixon made to a reporter about Vietnam War. The comment was published in first edition of a Chicago Sun Times article; after pressure by the White House, his remarks were withdrawn from later editions of the Sun Times. The last edition was microfilmed, but the first editions, which had been collected by local libraries, were thrown away when these libraries purchased microfilm sets. No known record of what Nixon actually said now exists. History was lost.
The richness of the reading experience from an original paper can’t be underestimated. It provides flavour and atmosphere, a connection to the past, an understanding of our past. Robert Darnton, who reviewed Double Fold for the New York Review of Books asked “How will historians piece together a picture of American mentality in the Gilded Age if they have no newspapers – real newspapers, full-size and in full color – to consult?”
Then there is the expense: The Philadelphia Inquirer no longer exists in its original form but, according to Baker, you can buy a whole Inquirer set on microfilm for $621,515. Librarians feltthey couldn’t build warehouses, but claiming to be too poor to afford storage costs was perfect justification for making such huge expenditures on microfilm. However, Baker tells us that storing collections of original newspapers in a warehouse is, compared to the cost of a set of microfilm, a bargin: “a year of a daily paper would occupy less than half the Barbie aisle in a Toys “R” Us.”
Was this expense, this waste, necessary? Baker debunks the “crumbling” publication myth. Paper actually holds up well and microfilm, once thought to have been a permanent solution, is actually not very durable. Fortunately, the librarians’ pogrom against newspapers has been brought to a halt. But could the enthusiasm for digitizing produce another purge of paper? Perhaps, however, the rise of digitization reveals a tragic irony.
Now that historic newspapers are to become “the next wave of content” on the web, I wonder where the digitized images will come from. It is amazing to think that we’ll have searchable images of newspapers in their original forum from practically every newspaper published in Canada from 1750 to 1950. Cold North Wind plans to digitize the entire Toronto Star from 1892 onward. Our digital age seems capable of putting perfect reproductions online, but how can the record be complete or “perfect”? Fortunately, in Canada, our cache of original newspapers seems to be more complete than south of the border. But, digitizers working on American newspaper collections can, in many cases, only make their copies from imperfectly produced microfilm copies.
And what happens when current digital technology becomes obsolete? If we continue to dispose of original knowledge products, who will keep our thoughts for future generations? The e-book is part of the problem, according to D.T. Max (whose article “The Last Book” was originally published in The American Scholar and reprinted in the March-April 200, The Utne Reader). Max claims the e-book is pushing us toward the belief (hence the reality) “that knowledge is in perpetual flux.” If e-books are not perceived to have lasting value, unlike their paper counterparts that have traditionally occupied the top of the information hierarchy, will we keep them? And what will become of “lesser” objects? Files are easy to delete.
Digitization is a fact of life for many new photographs, newspapers, and books. In time the knowledge products from earlier centuries may also be digitized. Having wide-open access to this archival resource will be a fantastic resource. Hopefully we’ll be more careful with the originals – both paper and electronic – so our future-generation copies look good and provide us with a complete record.
The Knowledge Marketing Inquiry: What balance should be struck between digital preservation and original document conservation? Send me your comments:
RobFerguson@KnowledgeMarketingGroup.com