NY Times: History, Digitized (and Abridged) — In the Internet age, historical records that have not been converted to digital form could vanish from the nation’s memory.
Digitizing books is easy compared with music, film, especially given copyright issues, and other items, such as handwritten notes. The cost of converting so much material is why historical archives are turning to groups such as Google to pay the cost.
The articles touched upon interesting collections, such as:
- The collection of ancient manuscripts of Matthew Parker, an archbishop of Canterbury, which are housed at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University
- A letter written by Jacqueline Kennedy to Leonard Bernstein after he conducted a memorial for Robert F. Kennedy
- More than 1 million photos from The New York World-Telegram & Son
- Copies of The National Intelligencer, a newspaper published in Washington in much of the 19th century.