The Quantum Archivist

Digital Pioneers web site

A few months ago I posted a bit about Digital Pioneers, a project I was involved with that has as it’s aim a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005) and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were present at the creation. The original project was organized around a class project at the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science Program. After the class ended, responsibility for Digital Pioneers was transferred to the Digital Initiatives office here at the Penrose Library, where we will continue to develop the project and interview more subjects as time and resources permit.

Our goal is to put a human face on the development of cultural heritage digitization. The story of the content and the technology development is told in the peer-reviewed publications and white papers, but we want to find out what people were actually thinking and attempting to do when they embarked on building the digital future; the challenges they faced, and the insights they developed as agents of change.

For now, there is a somewhat eclectic (but based on specific criteria) gathering of reminiscences, observations, and visions from a small group of people we were able to contact and interview in the time that we had. More interviews are in the pipeline, and many more people have already been identified as potential interview subjects. If you have a suggestion for someone who should be interviewed, please fill out the Suggestion Form on the Digital Pioneers web site. And for now, enjoy hearing the stories from a time and place that is fast becoming only a memory.

Four and a half years ago, Clifford Lynch wrote an article in DLib magazine called “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries.” Prior to looking ahead, he did a brief bit of looking back, quickly summarizing the history of the rather vague term “digital libraries.”  He admitted that there was as yet a “poorly chronicled pre-history and early history” of the field. That comment, plus the opportunity to host the IMLS’s Web Wise conference in Denver later this year led a group of us to think that maybe this was an area that needed some attention. From that came the idea of Digital Pioneers, a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005)  and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were an integral part of it all.

The digital future in which we now live was the created by a combination of the work of individuals, organizations, and public and private policy. That the scholar’s desktop envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945 looks amazingly like the digital research library resources we know today is because of long conversations that developed into shared visions. These intellectual and policy interactions among , individuals, organizations, government agencies, practitioners, and researchers created the digital “library” we know today.

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  again says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.”   By 2005, Lynch further 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.”

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.

The legacy of standards, practices, mindsets, and approaches developed in that decade informed a entirely new generation of digital librarians, archivists, and theorists and laid a foundation that has become the cornerstone of a profession and has made it into course syllabi in academic institutions across the world.

The scholarly publications, white papers, and conference proceedings tell the official story of the era, but what we want to do is get to the personal stories of how people got involved and what they hoped to do, and if their vision turned into reality.

We are now developing some selection criteria and beginning our first round of interviews. It should be an interesting conversation.