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Newberry Symposium Addresses Economics of Digitization“Through digitization, the humanities have an economy. We’ve finally arrived,” quipped historian Tobias Higbie at “The Economics of Digitization: Toward Sustainability and Institutional Collaboration,” a May 17–18 symposium at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Composed primarily of academic librarians, the group of 150 heard 27 speakers detail the dos and don’ts of public-private partnerships.The consensus was that alliances between collection-rich nonprofits and deep-pocketed partners are a win-win for everyone; Readex/Newsbank Vice President Remmel Nunn went so far as to characterize such linkages as the “perfect example of symbiosis.” Most of the librarian panelists agreed, one estimating the cost of maintaining an online collection as being 10 times the expenditure of creating one in the first place. Among the collaboration enthusiasts was Kristine Brancolini of the Indiana University Digital Library Program, who opined that the best projects to outsource are large-scale digitization of “homogeneous source materials” when staff has mastered the skills needed so they can oversee quality control. Anne Craig of the Illinois State Library’s Illinois Digital Archives project and Amy Maroso of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) told how federal funding has underwritten a mushrooming online repository thanks to the establishment of a digital-skills “boot camp” for grant winners. “There’s no such thing as an innocent act of representation,” cautioned the first day’s keynote speaker, UIUC library school Dean John Unsworth. The “digital surrogate” of a painting can differ from the original due to file compression and color correction, he said, while a poem’s meaning changes outside its context in a larger work. Nonetheless, Unsworth predicted that the online aggregation of primary-source materials, such as those found at the Whitman Archive, would catalyze a “renaissance of humanities scholarship—but don’t hold your breath.” “At the end of the day, we need to digitize what people want,” emphasized day two keynoter, ProQuest President Ron Klausner, who cited the popularity of such products as the Preserving Americana database, which contains the full runs of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. “If the libraries and monasteries in the Middle Ages had operated only on this model, who knows what we’d have left,” disagreed Bernard F. Reilly of the Center for Research Libraries, who challenged vendors and librarians to “stay ahead of the market” by capturing today’s “low-use knowledge materials.” The symposium was sponsored by content-management firm Innodata-Isogen. Posted May 21, 2004. |
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