Digitization Done Right!

In my earlier post on document digitization/preservation (see "Saving Your Family Stuff" in the blog archive), I suggested that digitization and preservation were both good ideas, but were not exactly synonymous. In fact, both things need to happen.

Here’s a great example of digitization done right.

The archivists at the Library of Virginia (LVA), as part of the Civil War Legacy 150 Project (that’s the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial), are traveling around the state, digitizing privately held documents from the Civil War era.  This won’t preserve the actual documents themselves, but it will, in the words of the Virginia archivists “…preserve their valuable intellectual content.”

Later this month (September 18th), they’ll be at the Meyera Oberndorf Central Library in Virginia Beach from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, available to scan “…letters, pension materials, military passes, discharge papers, diaries, hand-drawn maps, and other Civil War–era manuscripts.”

Ultimately, the scans (i.e., “intellectual content”) will be available to researchers at LVA.

Amen to that!