Digitization and Access

Reading about the Google Books project in another class got me thinking about digitizing projects and e-book access. In that class, we read an article called “One Title, Hundreds of Volumes, Thousands of Documents” about one library’s attempt to add to the Google Books project by donating their volumes of the Congressional Serial Set, along with metadata to help make individual documents searchable. Their main problem was in creating the metadata for these thousands of documents, which was certainly a time-intensive task.

I then ran across an article about digitizing law books called “Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age,” by Eric Eckholm, published in the New York Times and readable here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html?_r=0 The article discusses how Harvard’s Law School Library is digitizing almost their whole collection of law books in order to make them accessable. They also intend to make them searchable via relationships between cases and their themes. The plan is to make them available to nonprofit organizations and scholars at first, and then available to commercial organizations after the first eight years.

I think that one of the (many) important points to consider is the ability to find the material. Adding relevant metadata or creating complex searching techniques, or both, is a crucial part of the process. Without the ability to find relevant information, digitizing the books is a pointless process. Although I think that making this information available is creating a valuable resource, I also think that this is an important place for librarians to work. Librarians and other information professionals need to be at the forefront of the field, to help make the digitized resources relevant and findable.