ABSTRACT
The conversion of materials from printed format to digital representations is no longer experimental. Digitization has been demonstrated and its value has been proved by a series of projects, including work at Cornell University, the National Agriculture Library, Elsevier Science Publishers, Bell Labs, the University of Michigan, and the Library of Congress. The cost per page for scanning materials into digital form continues to drop as the process becomes more automated, at least for those classes of material that have relatively uniform characteristics and have not severely deteriorated. Production digitization of other “print-like” formats, such as microfilm and photographs, remains more experimental (given the great variations in the characteristics of these materials), but some aspects have already been explored through several large-scale pilot projects. The use of digitization technologies to convert analog sound and motion picture recordings to the digital domain is still quite costly and complex. While now used routinely in the entertainment industries (for example, in the production of audio CDs from old master tapes), the process is not yet viewed as a practical method of transforming most library collections.
