We live in a society of abundant information. As Bill Turkel writes, “In the very near future, the problem won’t be to find interesting sources to articulate with place, it will be to filter out the ones that aren’t relevant to the task at hand” (12). This semester we have discussed both the opportunities and challenges of access to so much data and how to ensure that the same data will be available in the future. The readings and websites that we are analyzing this week demonstrate that everyone has these same issues. No field of study, no archivist, no blogger or website creator is exempt from issues of preservation and profusion. How do we choose which software will be most reliable in the future? Do we have confidence that preservation projects will make information accessible for future scholars?
I really enjoyed perusing the collections of the IU Digital Library Program, but this site also brought up questions of preservation and accessibility. In Digital History, Cohen and Rosensweig demonstrate the intricacies of copyright law on the web. They reference a photograph by Dorothea Lange that is theoretically copyrighted on the Corbis website, but is available for free through the Library of Congress. The issue of photo copyrights from old sources made me wonder about the difficulties of digitizing the Indiana Magazine of History. I know that scholars today must secure the rights to use a photo in a printed work and on the internet, but what about journals that were created long before digital media? How do digitization projects treat old photographs that were never intended to be online? It would be a shame to go to all the effort of digitizing the issues and not be able to have the “full” articles because images had to be withheld.
ScholarWorks offers exciting opportunities for campus departments and programs. University constituents can submit papers, reports, and magazines to make them accessible and ensure their survival. Is this a way for people to preserve their work when they do not have the time, money, or expertise to do it on their own? I understand the importance of preserving department reports and theses, but I was surprised to see individual papers and syllabi available there. Can anyone in a collaborating department preserve documents through ScholarWorks? Is there a level of scholarship that is too small for libraries to be concerned with, at least while there are so many larger projects that are not yet preserved? Which departments get involved with such a project, and why wouldn’t more departments want to be a part of it? This project certainly seems like academic collaboration at its best, both on our campus and between universities.
It is simultaneously exciting and exhausting to think about all the digitization work underway. Setting the limits on research projects will be difficult with such an abundance of information. At the same time it is challenging to think about our role in preserving sources for future historians. It seems that historians still have much to learn about how we can assist archivists and librarians in this process.
