This article explains why the HathiTrust digital repository promises increased online access to archival materials.
Increasingly, our visitors are going to be virtual.
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| — | Archivist Kathy Stewart Jordan in an interview for her undergraduate alumni news. “We have more people visit online than come into the library,” Jordan says. “I’ve been able to work on a project with a professor in Germany that would not have been possible if not for email.” |
I have seen us take these things that are fragile and couldn’t stand that much handling and we have digitized them and put them out where everyone can see them…
That said, only about 1% of Canada’s documentary history is online… and we have a whole generation who believe that, if they can’t call it up on their computer or on their BlackBerry, it doesn’t exist.
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| — | Ian Wilson, the retiring Librarian and Archivist of Canada, in a Kingston Whig Standard article. |
The Washington State Library hosts digital collections of small and rural libraries’ special collections, faciliating access to unique materials housed in institutions which could not adequately run their own digital projects. Not to mention this creates a good one-stop location for multi-repository searching.
We want to… make it so that if something is public that means that it’s online.
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| — | A great story on NPR yesterday about government data, not archives. But the recent interest in recovery.gov has sparked public debates about access & democracy which apply directly to the digitization of archives. Additionally, the way libraries & archives are depicted in popular media (“obscure,” “dusty” “dark warehouses”) should spark some concern in the profession. |
Researchers have a better chance of finding what they need when working with archived papyrus, Neal said, than in locating and capturing what was posted on the Web this morning.
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Columbia University Librarian James Neal, quoted in Karen R. Long’s somewhat scattered Plain Dealer article on the fate of books in the digital age. But how is the archive superior? Precision and recall of information retrieval? Papyri certainly can’t be more accessible than online documents, right? |
