Alison L. Joseph is Director of Digital Scholarship at Gratz College
As a library professional and academic, I love books! I think my husband of 18 years is still shocked by the number of books I brought into our marriage. Currently, we share a home office with bookshelves lining the walls. His books fill one set of shelves, while my books overflow the remaining shelves. There’s nothing quite like holding a physical book or browsing a shelf for a well-known volume by the colors and style of its cover. While it often feels like there is unnecessary tension created between the physical and digital, this doesn’t need to be the case. I can have an affinity for books and still be an ardent (perhaps, even militant) advocate for digitization.
As the Director of Digital Scholarship at Gratz College, I oversee the development and collections of our new Grayzel Digital Platform, formally launching today on World Digital Preservation Day.
The three primary reasons I encourage digitization are access, preservation, and ownership.
Access
Digitization and digital publication make sources accessible to people all over the world - from their homes, libraries, and universities. While archival research is fulfilling and exciting—surely, we all hope to find that long-lost manuscript one day—it is also expensive, time consuming, and potentially dangerous for reasons like climate change and geo-political conflict. In a post-COVID world, many of us now expect information and documents to be available online. And while I am grateful to the organizations that made many sources freely available online during the health and safety travel bans of 2021 and 2022, it has also resulted in some researchers and funders losing enthusiasm for lengthy archival research trips. This is especially true in the US, where funding for humanities endeavors has been cut—both drastically and erratically. You never know whether a project will be green-lit, making research plans tenuous at best. Digitization and digital publication mean that researchers can access archival sources around the world without leaving their hometown. In a world filled with false information and fake news, making primary sources more readily available to a greater number of people is a crucial way to preserve the historical record for future generations.
Preservation
Digitization provides a wide variety of ways to preserve the original, physical object, while affording digital access to a broad audience. After digitization, these original objects are rarely handled or exposed to light, both of which can accelerate deterioration. Archival materials are often fragile and damaged; a single touch may further degrade them. Providing researchers with digital access will cause no further harm to the originals, and the use of digital surrogates will extend the life expectancy of important objects. Interestingly, our contemporary digital tools are so powerful that examining a digital copy may offer a more enhanced experience than looking at the originals with the naked eye. Technologies like multispectral imaging, X-ray fluorescence, and “virtual unwrapping” allow us to read erased and faded text, separate overlapping layers, and even “open” folded documents without physically touching them.
Ownership
A physical object can only exist in one place and time. If you want access to it, you need to go where that item exists, or have it brought to you. Digital copies, however, have superpowers. They not only open up access to more people in more places (argument #1), but they also allow for joint or multiple possessions. This possibility is especially important as we grapple with questions of provenance—where artifacts come from—and the legacies of looting, colonization, and displacement. Acutely relevant for our work are concerns about Judaica Provenance (see Finkelman and Margolis, 2024). Inevitably, an examination of provenance leads to questions of the ethics of repatriation. These issues are vast and complicated—too detailed for me to address here, but digital copies allow for a certain amount of sharing, a productive band-aid on the quagmire of digital repatriation. For more, see Beyond Access: Rethinking Ownership, Justice, and Decolonization in Digital Repatriation Initiatives.
This is what we aim to do on the Grayzel Digital Platform. Many of our collections are made available publicly for the first time on our platform. Thanks to many donors, we have been able to digitize more than 130,000 single images of the Elie Wiesel papers, with more in process. We recently completed the digitization of the Lena Allen-Shore Papers, which are housed at Gratz College, but we have no archival reading room in which to make them securely available. Digitization has allowed us to increase access to global audiences, preserve these important materials, and share them with the world.
An additional bonus (and perhaps a fourth argument for digitization) is that once in their digital form, we can use AI and other technologies to further our discoveries within these collections. Technologies that are improving exponentially every day will increase our ability to translate and transcribe documents, making them infinitely more searchable and discoverable, and accessible to many different language speakers. While the use of AI is equally divisive, it is already a method that we are applying to various collections on our site. The materials we have are beyond our staff capacity. Without an army of staff who read all the languages, AI is making it possible for us to publish our digitized material years sooner than would have been possible using traditional methods.
So, on this World Digital Preservation Day, let’s raise a glass to the technologies that make digitization and digital access possible, without worry we might spill champagne on the original documents!