Week of 11/9 lectures and reading

I really enjoyed this week's lecture and some of the readings as well. In fact, it may have been my favorite lecture so far in the entire course. I'm very interested in the process of digitization and preservation and the issues surrounding it. Like many, I found it ironic that Google doesn't even preserve its history going back to 1998 and furthermore, I have to agree that digitization is just a way to backup originals and shouldn't be used as a substitute for them. This point was further evidenced by the amount examples cited like the Alexandria Library in which innumerable resources were lost forever. As always, it's best to have multiple copies of documents for the sake of preservation. In any case, it reminded me of some of the things covered in the Intro to Archives class I took last spring, so it's nice to see tie-ins with other courses and subjects, too.