27.04.12; Archives on the Web: A summary of an article by Cohen
and Rosenzweig
The Library of Congress’s
American Memory website is a vital part of its national digital library agenda. Its internet origins date back to the 1990’s
when the main historical collections of the library were sent to educational
institutions on optical discs.
It was so successfully received
that by the early 21st century more than 8 million items had been
posted on the worldwide web. The collections included every period of American
history and almost every kind of document and image available in the library’s
collections.
D. Cohen and R.
Rosenzweig argued that impressive as this was; archives on the web were too varied
and seemed to have no clear historical origin. They observed that this was because
the methods used to bring them together were not consistent in all cases. This
was probably due to the extensive and wide-ranging items that were collected.
Commercial digitizers
such as Google have an advantage over public institutions like the Library of
Congress because of the difference in availability of funding. This means that
they can cover the costs of converting documents and books for the internet.
Furthermore, copyright
laws mean that companies that purchase copyrights can afford to capitalize on
the access to archives. However even
companies such as Google and Amazon have constraints on the amount they can display.
In view of these factors Cohen and Rosenzweig concluded that free online
archives probably would not be accessible until the 22nd century.
Summary of article Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the
past on the web. Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig;
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