What course will digitization take?

I received this over the Digital Medievalist listserv:

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WORKSHOP: Host your texts on Google in one day

The Center For Hellenic Studies will conduct a one-day workshop at the Center’s Washington, D.C., campus, on Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, with the subject: “Host your texts on Google in one day”. Bring one or more XML texts to the workshop in the morning, and leave in the afternoon with a running Google installation of Canonical Text Services serving your texts to the internet (http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/cts).

For more information, including how to apply, please see http://chs75.harvard.edu/CTSWorkshop.html.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Posted by: Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (rosselli at ling dot unipi dot it)

URL: http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/workshop-host-your-texts-on-google-in-one-day/



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I'm afraid, good or bad, that this is the path that digitization is going to take over the next ten years. Here's the problem:
1) Archives and Libraries have something that Google needs: artifacts, whether those are books, photographs, etc.
2) Google has what Archives and Libraries don't have: Money. Lots and lots of money.

Google wants the materials to digitize them; Libraries and Archives need the technological foundation (money, hardware, human labor) to digitize their materials. It's a very simple solution for Google to dangle a pile of money and resources in the faces of Archives or Libraries to say, "Look, we've got what you can't possibly get in these hard times."

And researchers simply want to be able to access materials. In reality they could care less who has digitized them, who has made them available online. All that matters to researchers is that the materials exist in the digital environment, and that they are easy to access.

While I'm charge of digitization in an archive, I have to admit, Google has a lot going for it in this capitalist economy where archives and libraries don't generate a lot of revenue.