Week 3: Live Digitizing

In the third week of class, we observed Professor Ballard demonstrating the process of placing digitized content online. He gave us the background information relating to selection of content (Quinnipiac's old course books), then demonstrated the simple task of uploading files. He usefully pointed out the difference between a scanned image and the coding of its content, a necessary element for searchability. The steps were simple, but nicely illustrative of the routine-oriented and often repetitive nature of digitization projects. In a way, the process demonstrated in the third week was reminiscent of putting a new book on a shelf. Scanning and uploading files are the simple and final steps in a more complex planning process, outlined in Week 2.

The Week 3 demonstration caused me to think again about how much of the process of building digital libraries really can seem like a behind-the-scenes effort. Uploading files and adding content to the web is easily demonstrable, while building an infrastructure, selecting resources, navigating file formats, assigning metadata, and preservation planning, are in many ways less tangible, though they are requisite components in the context of digitization projects at large. In this regard, I'd like to reiterate how effectively the Week 2 presentation, along with our textbook, have conveyed that there is much more than meets the eye to the process of building digital libraries.