My History of Digitization

My interest in digitization came on in a rather roundabout fashion. In fact, it's only within the last five years or so that I've really had much interest in technology at all. I graduated college in 2007 with a degree in journalism -- the first graduating class at my college that offered a concentration in online journalism, in fact. But I concentrated my studies in the more traditional, long-form magazine journalism, avoiding all that online stuff. Of course, a few months later, after my summer internship had come to an end and I needed to find a real job, I was ruing the fact that my technology skills were sorely lacking, as that's what all the job ads I saw were looking for.

Eventually, I was able to land a public relations job at a national nonprofit. Even though the organization itself was large, our staff was quite small, and when I was hired we were in the last months of a Web redesign. It was all hands on deck, especially where the communications department was concerned. I picked up HTML quickly, and discovered I really liked working on the Web site. I was able to pursue a lot of different technological interests, from putting up Web videos to making press materials available online, but I wanted to learn more.

So that's the tech side. The library/information side has pretty much been there since I got my first library card and realized they had all the stories I could ever want to read, for free. My first paying job was at that same library branch, and as my undergrad drew to a close, I began considering getting the graduate degree ... but I knew I wasn't ready to go straight back to school. I wanted to work on the content side of information for a while, before delving into the organizational structures behind it.

When I did finally decide to go back to school, I found myself especially drawn to the archives track, specifically, the intersection it offers with history and modernity. I have always been drawn to the history of the people and places that give context to the events of the present, and after my work on the Web in my last job, I had become very interested in how usage of information adapts to new technologies.

Both interests converged a few months before I left my nonprofit job. We were moving offices, and since the organization had been around since the 1960s, there was a lot of history to be moved with us. Unpacking a box of reel-to-reel tapes, I found one labeled, “Johnny Cash, 1975 PSA.” I’d read that the famous country singer had been a spokesman for us, but still a little thrill went down the back of my spine on discovering this little slice of our history. Unfortunately, we had no way to access the tape, lacking the technology to play it and the budget to have it converted.

I see digitization as the epitome of that intersection of history and modernity that so fascinates me. It isn't something I have had much history with as such, at least not on the back end, but it's a practice I wanted to learn more about. I strongly believe in the idea of democratic access that digitization affords, but I also understand that this entails some trade-offs. It's my goal in this class not only to become more educated about the specific practices of digitization, but also the overarching issues it entails for management and preservation.