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The E-Sylum: Volume 11, Number 15, April 13, 2008, Article 14 THOUGHTS ON DIGITIZING NUMISMATIC LITERATURE Mark Tomasko writes: "I was pleased to see the comments about the transitory nature of electronic media from Nancy Green and others. This is a crucial point which is too often ignored. And I was surprised at your statement that 'While digitizing books for easier access is great, the institutions should NEVER dispose of the original source material, although of course many do so anyway.' The logical result of that last statement ('...of course many do so anyway') is that digitizing books for easier access is NOT great. It is instead a significant threat to the survival of many books, and will become even more so as cost pressures of storage and space increase. My hope is that the '$150,000 digitizing machine' never shows up at the ANA library." [I didn't have time to make further comments last week, but this is a good follow-on topic. I was thinking specifically about libraries which deaccessioned their periodical holdings after microfilming or digitizing them. There are ephemera dealers making a very big business out of splitting up and selling massive archives of old newspapers, and it's a great loss to the institutions and our collective memory. Once broken up these sets cannot be reassembled. Without the originals to return to, the information can be lost forever if there's a problem with the new media. -Editor] Jorg Lueke writes: "I just wanted to share some thoughts about digital works. There's no doubt in my mind that at some point in the future everything will be published digitally. It's too powerful in terms of storage and search capability not to become the norm once technical details and protections are worked out. Certainly books will also stay around, at least until someone invents paper that behaves like a computer screen. "In the near term digitizing of out of print and out of copyright works will certainly continue as well. While the scanner mentioned in The E-Sylum costs $150,000, for 1/10th that price a decent amount of automation can be purchased. As I find the time I plan on putting the first six volumes of the Numismatist online. I've also been thinking about finding a way to let people share uploads of digitized books so that collectively the information can be much more quickly converted. "All of this will be quite good - more knowledge at more people's fingertips. Some things, like my recent purchase of the 1898 Numismatique Gazette may lose in value as the information becomes available online but for books that are in demand the collector base for the tactile word will probably keep prices pretty steady." DIGITIZING BOOKS HELPS RESEARCHERS DO THEIR HOMEWORK esylum_v11n14a13.html Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum | |
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