An Institutional Perspective of Digitization

Saunderson, Fred

An Institutional Perspective of Digitization

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Journal article

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Saunderson, Fred

Date published

April 26, 2016

Abstract

One third of the National Library of Scotland's collections will be held in digital format by 2025, the centenary of the Library's foundation (National Library of Scotland 2015). As a strategic objective, this goal is telling of the significance and role of 'digital' to contemporary, collecting cultural institutions. It also speaks to the scale and richness of analogue collections. The Library's collections come in all shapes, sizes and varieties, from bestselling paperbacks to archives of correspondence. The collections number well into the tens of millions, although counting the exact number of material objects is not feasible. All this in a single library which, in its current form as Scotland's national library, is less than a century old. As rapid as the growth of the physical collections has been, the expansion of the National Library's digital holdings promises to be more extreme. The Library's physical collections currently number around 25 million material objects. So far, we have digitized around 170,000 paper-based objects, generating about 5.2 million digital images, and we hold around 1.3 million digital journal articles and 50,000 ebooks, collected in accordance with the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013. Assuming our cumulative holdings rise to around 28 million by 2025, we anticipate that 33% – more than nine million – of these objects will be digital. The Library currently receives around 4,000 new physical objects every week and while it remains unlikely that print material will abate in the next decade the number of born-digital items available for collection will undoubtedly also rise, which in turn will contribute to the expansion of our digital holdings. However, as much as our born-digital collections will increase, this growth will not deliver the Library's aspirational one-third threshold. To 'plug the gap' many of the material objects in our collection will need to be transformed from analogue items into the 1s and 0s of machine-readable (digital) data. This process of digitization presents cultural institutions like the National Library with a significant set of opportunities and challenges. This essay will explore these, through examination of the nature of physical collections, the benefits of transforming these into digital form, and the associated problems and risks. The paper's aim is to describe some of the factors involved and dispel any idea that digitization, as a process, involves nothing more than 'scan and publish'.

Contributor (person)

Wallace, Andrea

Deazley, Ronan