Unique Items and Digitization

I really heard Michael Stephens in the Hyperlinked MOOC's Module 7 lecture when he complained about the fact that an item that was unique should have been digitized. I understand his perspective, but it's important to know why very few unique items are digitized.

There is a great deal of unique material out there in archives. Some of these archives share facilities and technical services staff with a library. I recently toured one such institution, and the archivist said that it would take him another year to complete the creation of finding aids for this archive's collections. Since I took a course on Archives and Manuscripts at SLIS, this didn't astonish me. I know about the challenges involved in the processing of archival materials.

 Let me tell you about finding aids. In addition to a couple of paragraphs about the nature of an archival collection, finding aids provide some descriptive details. The collection may contain hundreds of items. A library cataloger is usually describing one item at a time. When a cataloger creates MARC records of archival materials for the library's catalog, they are described at the collection level. A patron will then know about the existence of a collection, but will only have a general idea about its contents. A finding aid is more specific. The items are ordinarily organized in folders that are contained within boxes. The finding aid of a collection will most often describe it at the box level. If there are fifty boxes in the collection, the archivist will record the box labels on the finding aid. Please note that this is two levels of description above the individual item level. If an archivist had to describe every single item in a collection, the cataloging backlog would probably take decades to resolve. Finding aids are digitized using the metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) which I also studied at SLIS.

The creation and digitization of the finding aid is a prerequisite for digitizing items in the collection. Digitized objects need metadata. The finding aid gives patrons important background about the collection even if it doesn't include specific metadata about the item itself. So the next step in the digitization process would be to locate the object. This isn't necessarily a simple matter. There might be a number of boxes that contain similar materials. The archivist will need to examine the labels on every folder within those boxes in order to find the one item to be digitized. Then the archivist will scan the object, and provide item metadata that will usually appear on the same web page as the digitized object. This entire process is time consuming and labor intensive. It's also costly. Could mobile technology assist with the process? Well, a mobile phone could photograph the object, but that isn't really a problem that needs to be solved. I think that the barriers to digitization of unique materials from archival collections illustrate that technology isn't always a panacea. Unique materials are too complex to be described by a computer. This process still requires skilled human beings.