Archives can play a very large role in the lives of scholars. Archives can provide deep and hands-on insight into research. Physical archives allow you to immerse yourself into the history. You can feel the history throughout the items you touch. Those items were preserved so we could experience them in the same way they did so many years ago. This is so significant to scholars because they care about that topic and want to experience it. For the general public it is just really interesting and a cool experience to be able to see these archives in person. With Digital archives you lose that experience. You lose the close-up and personal feel of the history. However, digital archives are more accessible to not only scholars but the general public as well. Digitizing materials greatly affects our interaction with them. For example, when looking at a photo of a printing press stamp online, you have a different reaction than if you were holding the stamp in your hands. When we visited the Special Collections, I had the experience of actually holding several printing press stamps. I was able to feel the weight, see the details, and understand how it would have been used. If I had only looked at a photo it would not have been as interesting an experience.
When digitizing archival materials, there needs to be a good amount of though into which items archivists digitize. One of the main things to think about is consent. In the article “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis,” Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez states that, “the library profession’s blanket tendency to digitize pre-Internet print resources can be harmful especially if it clashes with the original consent of participants involved.”1 I found this interesting because it is true. Historians were given consent by the owners of certain materials to keep them in an archive. They were not always given consent to publish it to the internet for the entire world to see. These materials could include sensitive information that the owners may not want the public to know. This has been an issue in several cases over the years. Another thing that must be considered is the hardware in which the material is created. This mainly applies to already digital data, but digital for old hardware. 2 This old digital data would have to be converted to something that could be understood on our technology today. If the archives were physical, one could look at the data on a computer that the data was created on. They could see it how the people saw it in its time.
Manus, and Susan. “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1.” The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1 | The Signal, November 28, 2011. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/11/the-artifactual-elements-of-born-digital-records-part-1/.
Padilla, Thomas. “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis.” dh lib. dh lib, October 24, 2017. https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2017/09/13/archivalpraxis/.
- Padilla, Thomas. “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis.” dh lib. dh lib, October 24, 2017. https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2017/09/13/archivalpraxis/.
- Manus, and Susan. “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1.” The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1 | The Signal, November 28, 2011. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/11/the-artifactual-elements-of-born-digital-records-part-1/.
