A Mass Digitization Primer

Many people are talking these days about “digitizing books.” But what does that really mean? This paper describes different kinds of digitizing, the pros and cons of each, and suggests a layered structure for understanding “digitization.” The Digital Age has brought many challenges for librarians. Most obvious are all the issues concerning “born-digital” material that academics and the general public are generating. However, born-digital material is not the focus of this paper. A parallel effort to “digitize” the information currently locked up in print on physical paper has also emerged. There has been a lot of press recently about book digitization projects, as well as numerous predictions about the amazing things that can be accomplished when most of the world’s older print materials are available online. In order to evaluate these claims, we must first understand what is involved in achieving them. And a large part of that is understanding the many meanings of digitizing books. Page Pictures The simplest meaning of digitizing books is that digital pictures have been taken of the book pages. Page images are stored in one of several common graphical file formats and someone who wants to access the book will look through these page pictures. This is very similar to storing a book on microfilm or microfiche, except that the digital form does allow for some additional functionality. Page images can be captured using either a scanner or a digital camera. For the purposes of this discussion, the method makes no difference, since the end result is the same. A Mass Digitization Primer