Some Possible Research Paths for Digitization and Collection Management Research
1)      In the debate between Baker's "anti-surrogate" point of view and Manoff's, one very important issue is mentioned in both Baker's review of the Kindle 2 (page 5 of a printed version) and Manoff's discussion of the symbolic value of libraries in the modern era (page 6 of the printout, page 378 of the original journal’s print edition).  Click here to read Baker's Kindle review.  That is the distinction between owning a document and leasing the right to display a digital surrogate of it. 
       All of our discussion of codes was to get you to imagine how complex the mechanics of digital text reproduction really is--and it has to happen every time you attempt to read the text.  Worse still, Amazon continues to own the text-in-itself, and can terminate the Kindle's access to it at any time, just as EbscoHost etc. owns the right of access to the print journals that they offer in digital surrogates, and can terminate them in an instant.  Or, Amazon could just impose repeated access fees, and EbscoHost could raise (and has raised!) our subscription fees.  The costs could become so prohibitive that we would lose access to the entire family of journals represented by that search engine.  During the Library's move from the Julia Rogers building to the Athenaeum, one of the most heavily "weeded" sections of the library was its print periodical stacks.  Entire runs of important journals, like PMLA, were thrown out, though we had them going back to Volume 1, Number 1.  Now we are entirely dependent on EbscoHost for our access, and that access has to be paid for annually by the college and must be electronically approved by EbscoHost every time you try to read an article. By contrast, print text is produced once, and remains available to the owner unless something actively destroys it.  The only problem it presents is safe storage and retrieval, which we will study in the printed text segment of the course.

    Think about this situation like a business owner who wants to maximize profits at EbscoHost or Amazon.  You want to increase the number of customers, who ordinarily would rather not pay more for a digital text than they would for a print text.  It's a recurring cost, and digital is "inferior" to print in for many readers in C21, as print on paper was "inferior" to hand-written parchment in C16.  Nevertheless, at a certain point--and determining that point is a wonderful problem--you can increase the price you charge colleges to lease them display rights, and sometimes the increase can grow shockingly high.  Colleges who can pay, can "play," and those who cannot must cancel subscriptions, and ultimately courses and faculty appointments that depend upon access to the current scholarship the subscriptions provide.  How can you tell the point at which the price for digital text display rights can be increased, and how can you tell how much you can increase them?  The answers to those questions will determine your access to expert or scholarly information in the remainder of this century.

     To learn more about how Goucher's Library handles this problem, go to the Library Web page and look up the librarians responsible for collection management.  Interview them and brainstorm the choices facing librarians and scholars in the world of digital text.

2)         If you are interested in researching a major library's attempt to document the world's sacred texts using (first) microfilm and digitization, visit this web page describing a microfilming initiatives that has now gone digital:  Hill Museum and Manuscript Library.  Hill represents a monastery that has been attempting to rescue images of unique Christian manuscripts stored in libraries vulnerable to destruction by wars.  They began during the Cold War with early Christian manuscripts stored in European states bordering the former the Soviet Union.  If the Warsaw Pact nations had invaded Europe, possibly using nuclear weapons, it was thought likely that these central European libraries would be destroyed.  The Hill librarians began by using microfilm in the 1960s, but discovered that their microfilm copies were being destroyed by heat and humidity and "inherent vice," the built-in tendency of '60s-era films to decompose over time.  They returned to all these libraries with specially designed portable digitization equipment and are still hard at work.  What physical collections would you wish to preserve by digitization and why?