The Quantum Archivist

For all of you who might be interested in coming to Denver, you’ll have a perfect opportunity to mix business and pleasure. The IMLS’s Web Wise conference is coming to Denver on March 3-5, 2010. The University of Denver’s Penrose Library is the main sponsor of the event, along with the Denver Art Museum.

Every year the IMLS brings together practitioners and thinkers from all areas of cultural heritage digitization in a small group of usually no more than 300 or so for two days of presentations, discussion, and networking.

My part in the conference, beyond being the PI on the cooperative agreement with the IMLS is to start a new project called “Digital Pioneers.”  We will be attempting to document the history of cultural heritage digitization in the words of those who were present at the creation.

Although there were glimmerings of pre-history reaching as far back as the 1960s, the great age of experimentation lasted roughly from 1994 though 2005. It was not until the early 1990s that as Clifford Lynch says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.”   By 2005, Lynch notes, funding and support for “…the construction of prototype systems [was] at an end…” and “the novelty of constructing digital libraries as a research end in itself [had] run its course.” (Dlib Magazine, July, 2005)

By 2005,digitization had become a discipline with standards, practices, protocols, organizations and governance. It moved beyond the mere creation of content to focus on topics like preservation, data curation, sustainability, large-scale aggregation, information exchange, and cyberinfrastructure.

More to come on Digital Pioneers. Hope to see you in Denver.