All that is solid? The politics of digitization

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Digitized collections unsettle the role of tangible objects, like these antique duck decoys.  Photo credit:  Marcus Jeffrey

Digitized collections unsettle the role of tangible objects, like these antique duck decoys. Photo credit: Marcus Jeffrey

I’d never held a duck decoy in my hands before and certainly not one that was important enough to be in a museum’s collection. It was my first day as education curator at the Tuckerton Seaport Museum in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and along with Jackie Stewart, the director of the folklife center (it was her first day, too), I was organizing a small exhibit for the nature center. We arranged objects into a narrative about cultural experiences of nature, wrote labels, and tried to tell a story–albeit a short one–in that one vitrine. Even though this was the mid-2000s, it never occurred to either of us to go back to our desks and scour the Internet for photos of decoy carvers or ducks. We were focused on the physical objects housed at the museum.

What a difference a decade makes. Theresa Koenigsknecht’s recent posts on this blog, ”Surfing with purpose: Online collections as exhibit resources,” discuss how the availability of digital historical resources, particularly from the Internet Archive, shape how exhibits are created at the Indiana Historical Society. That digitization is the way of the future seems incontrovertible. In the ten years since that decoy exhibit, the amount of cultural heritage material that has become available on the Internet has exploded, giving small public history institutions access to resources that were previously unimaginable and helping museums make better use of their own collections. According to the New York Times, only two percent of a museum’s collections are on exhibit at any time (“The Good Stuff in the Back Room,” March 12, 2009), mostly because of issues of space. There’s just not enough room to put out all the interesting stuff. In that case, digitization seems like a godsend: take photos of it all and upload them to the museum’s website and, voilà, instantaneous access!

Or is it? Physical objects have a different aura than their digital counterparts. And despite the sense of ease that “plug and play” technologies often give us, serious digitization projects are neither easy nor cheap. Realistically, only certain museum and archival objects and materials will be digitized. Often, the materials that get digitized are those associated with big names and national history. As Misty DeMeo writes about digitization plans at Library and Archives Canada, “this digitization program is expected to follow the government’s commemorative agenda, which is likely to provide access to a litany of war records and other cultural touchstones and precious little else.”

These questions about what counts as part of our cultural heritage and who gets to decide are ones that public historians have been asking about IRL (“in real life,” in Internet-speak) objects and exhibits for decades. We really need to start asking them more frequently about the digital sphere.

man carving duck decoys

This c.1926 photo of a Massachusetts decoy carver is available through the Boston Public Library’s digitized collection. Photo credit:  Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Digitization potentially allows for the exhibition of that back room but only if those in charge of the digitization process are interested in making available that which has not been easily accessible. Perhaps more insidious is the fact that the easier it gets to find good cultural heritage material online, the less likely we are to go back to our own collections areas (or to borrow from the small site a few miles away).

Is the unintended consequence of large-scale but not complete digitization the functional obliteration of these unused collections? If it’s easier to do a Google search than traipse through the basement, vault, or backroom (and I’m guessing in most museums and historic sites, it is), does that mean that we will overlook what’s in our own backyard for what’s more easily available elsewhere, even if it’s not as locally relevant or unique? The release of new tools facilitating institutions’ ability to share materials digitally makes this seem more likely.

Just the other week, I was reading a book that quoted Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Curious, I found Berman’s book in Google books and read the passage that the quote came from but only that passage. Two days later, I went into our guest bedroom and saw the book lying on one of my shelves. It never occurred to me to check my own non-digital collection before going to Google. To be honest, even if I had remembered owning the book, I still might have done the same thing. As we throw ourselves into digitization, it’s worth pausing to think about how our practices will change, perhaps keeping Berman’s title front and center in our minds.

~ Mary Rizzo is Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities and co-editor of The Public Historian.

6 comments
  1. Peter Evans says:

    A few years ago I read an article in the NY Times concern major digitalization projects. It cites the Yale U. Library and the Library of Congress each with massive on going projects. At the current pace each realized that they’d never have more than about 10% of their collections in digitally accessible form. This translates into a very narrow band of information available to researchers who are not willing to dig in and follow tried and true research processes. Yet, many will assume that they are seeming the whole world. The mentality that is growing is “if it ain’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist”. This is a debillitating and dangerous conclusion. It will also stifle originality since we automatically each have finite access to the same material. There are other issues but enough said.

  2. Adina Langer says:

    This puts me in mind of Luke Tredinnick’s article in History in the Digital Age where he talks about the making of the digital archive privileging high profile content favored by big-name donors and other powerful people. Digitization might democratize access to material, but id doesn’t necessarily democratize the content of the archive that may be accessed…

  3. Amanda Mecke says:

    The Digital Public Library — DPLA — provides a portal supporting quality curation that can free public historians to focus on research rather than technology. No one collection, no matter how small or large, should have to convert and display digital materials on their own. Sharing costs and solutions is cost-effective and supplements rather than competes with physical exhibits.

  4. Larry Naukam says:

    As a volunteer who has digitized over 3000 items for local historical scoots and libraries, and about 200,000 pages of various church and town historian records, I agree that access is important. But again, the comment that “if it’s not on the Internet it doesn’t exist” is taking hold. We need to be proactive tour guides to the collections, interpreting them and encouraging good research practices in addition to making more items available.

  5. Larry Naukam says:

    As a volunteer who has digitized over 3000 items for local historical societies and libraries, and about 200,000 pages of various church and town historian records, I agree that access is important. But again, the comment that “if it’s not on the Internet it doesn’t exist” is taking hold. We need to be proactive tour guides to the collections, interpreting them and encouraging good research practices in addition to making more items available. [a pox upon computerized spell checkers!]

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