Fast Company recently published The Trouble with Digitizing History.

Tina Amirtha claims “The Netherlands spent seven years and $202 million to digitize huge swaths of AV archives that most people will never see.”

She interviews Tom de Smet, head archivist of the Sound and Vision Institute, and Gene DeAnna, acting chief of the recorded sound section at the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

‘”It doesn’t make sense to digitize everything,” de Smet says in his office at Sound and Vision. “You have ask yourself, ‘Who are you doing this for?’” Researchers may be interested in a narrow set of media, while the public may prefer a skim of the archives. “Honestly, only a little bit of the funding should go towards digitization and the rest, towards digital preservation,” says de Smet.’

The problems are many:

• high costs
• limited copyright clearances
• indexing and meta-tagging needs for search retrieval
• differing audiences: researchers and general public
• media platform choices: in-house hosting or Youtube

Future considerations include:

• securing pre-licenses to kick in after 25 years
• donations of lesser known works by media companies

A major concern is that, over time, systems impose technological barriers to access. For instance, who still has a U-matic deck or even a VHS player?

My take: this is the paradox of the modern information age: whereas paper-based documents can last hundreds of years, digital works may be corrupt within a decade and obsolete within two decades. Is digital a Faustian bargain?