Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
often, run against the grain of the services and functionality that a
general audience expect to see.
The
Shifting Gears
report raised this argument to another level,
focusing not just on standards but the whole 'best practice' approach to
digital capture. Best practice in digitization has traditionally demanded
careful attention to high-resolution capture of rich digital images or
other documents, with detailed, hand-crafted metadata lovingly added
in as context. To sum up the bullish response of
Shifting Gears
to all this:
'Quality vs. quantity - Quantity wins!' The report identified the
marginal position of digitization within library infrastructure and the
underuse and subsequent sustainability problem of digital resources as
being caused by overly precise methods: 'Our intricate attempts to
describe and present a few choice collections have resulted in expensive,
but little-used websites. And the rest of our [non-digitized] collections
remain largely invisible' (Erway and Schaffner, 2007, 8). To the authors
of
Shifting Gears
, slavishly following prescribed guidelines has got in the
way of the bigger picture.
However, it is not just best practice, but a whole conceptual
approach to digitized content that is still acting as a significant barrier
to its wider diffusion. The overwhelming majority of digitization
projects have focused on digitizing photographs, drawings, postcards or
documents with the intention of delivering them from a custom-made
website, which institutions have been responsible for either creating
themselves or, at the very least, paying somebody else to create. The
result has been to create digital silos - lumps of digital content that
cannot be shared, reused or cross-searched without considerable
difficulty, even when their content is of a similar nature.
To counter this, there needs to be greater openness, allowing data to
be shared, reused and republished, often for purposes different from
those for which they were intended. Beyond the sheer quantity of
documents that it can digitize, the clear advantage of the Google Books
Digitization Programme is that it places the digital content in a web
environment (that of Google Search) within which millions of users are
already familiar with how the interface operates.
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There is a much
greater chance of a user finding rare books from, for instance, the
University of Oxford if they are hosted on a Google website than if they
are hidden on the University's ox.ac.uk domain.
In many cases it is quite simple things that restrict the flow of
