Digitizing The Past

In this Twenty first century, no one can argue that the use of New Media is already and becoming even more dominant across all scientific fields, and thus history. However, it was not until 1994, four years after the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau that Morris Pierce created the first known to be a historical web site. Since then, prestigious museums, campus universities, towns and cities across the world, societies and companies have been using the New Media as a tool to provide access as well as to promote themselves to the open world. In order to accomplish this, it requires a large amount of material digitizing and archiving.
Nevertheless, digitizing the past has its advantages and disadvantages. Using these examples below, I will illustrate and analyze the benefits and drawbacks of digitizing certain historical materials.

First, I looked at the digitized book "1984” by George Orwell at Google books. One great advantage of digitizing books is that the public can get access to the content at no cost. Instead of stacking books at home, now a USB disc is enough to hold millions of books. And furthermore, a web user can read the reviews about the book first before purchasing or sacrifice time to read it. However, there is not entirety of content. In the case of 1984 and Who Governs (Robert Dahl), there are chapters missing. Google books only provides 2/3 of the book content in order to encourage the reader to purchase the book. For other institutions, you will have to be a member or become a member in order to get access to the full content of the book (or download it).

Second, I looked at the the Open Content Alliance Website. The Open Content Alliance is a non-profit and a collaborative organizational group which helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material for universal access. But when you look at the Open Content Alliance goals from an writer's (author) prospective, that is bad news. Authors should worry about the issue of legitimation and authority. Digitizing books puts the authors' copyright at great risk. A hard copy of any historical material can hardly be copied. However, a digitized version of anything can be duplicated, pirated, illegally stolen, sabotaged and destroyed with just a smileful click of mouse.

Third, I looked at the the Louvre Museum website. Every historical material the museum possesses is pretty much digitized. The material is offered in more than three different languages. This is tremendously advantageous in term of making knowledge available and reaching out to those who cannot afford the cost of a travel. However, the feeling someone gets from contemplating the “Venus de Milo”“or the Taj Mahal cannot simply be digitized. The digital material buries the human and object connection. This will of experiencing historical artifacts first hand vanishes.