Pros and Cons of Digitization

Last year, I took LIS 616 Records Management during the Spring Semester here at UW-Madison. One of the options for the final project for that class was to produce informational material to be used by Peg Eusch, the UW records officer. Lyuba Stadnik (another student in our LIS 644 class) and I worked together to create material about the costs and benefits of digitization. One of the items we made was a short video about the pros and cons of digitizing records, which is posted below. Even though it was tailored to address concerns of records management, many of the points highlighted in this video were also brought up in the readings for this week. In addition, we had to cope with copyright issues, another topic of this week's readings. I specifically sought out images and audio that were in the public domain when producing the video, and I acknowledged those sources in the end credits. The difficulties in preserving digitized and born-digital documents will only become more pronounced in the future so being aware of these challenges is important.

Finally, as a disclaimer, because we had no budget to create our material, I was forced to do some of the voice-overs in this video. Therefore, I must apologize in advance for my terrible voice acting. Enjoy.