he replied by making a point that seems to me undeniable: “I guess what we’re really doing is we’re having a short Dark Ages of scribalism as we transcribe from the original records into the electronic form. There’s going to be that same blot on the historical record in our age as there was in the Middle Ages.”

I have no doubt that Dale Flecker believed what he was saying when he told me that “the machine catalogue is in almost no cases worse and in most cases better than the card catalogue was.”

N-LINE catalogues are wonderful things in principle—things of efficacy, and even, occasionally (as in the case of O.C.L.C.’s Online Union Catalog), of grandeur. As a result of the publicly financed expansion of higher education in the sixties, and the boom in academic publishing that followed it, the holdings of the typical university library have doubled over the last twenty years. Without on-line catalogues, and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which on-line catalogues are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. By the early seventies, there was an ominous arrearage of uncatalogued material waiting on herds of rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloguing departments of most large libraries. Cataloguing had reached a state of crisis similar to the one that forced the financial markets to close early during some of the high-volume weeks of 1969, when Wall Street’s paper-based methods of order processing couldn’t keep up with each day’s orders to buy and sell stock. Computerized stock-execution saved Wall Street (and made program trading and Brack Monday possible, too), and computerized cataloguing procedures saved libraries.

(The more modication a library demands of eachMARC record, the more it costs.) In Harvard’s case she typicallyaccepts the record as is, even when the original card bearsadditional subject headings or enriching notes of various kinds.

OCLC owns the largestdatabase of bibliographic information in the world, and it oers aservice called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer oldcatalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from ftycents to six dollars per card.

More recently, a media organization along with a prominent theatre group brought out short visual representations of popular poems. The express purpose of this project, Kaavya Kannadi was, as the website says in heavily Sanskritized Kannada, to reach out to youngsters between 17 and 40 years. The videos do away with the need to read the poems, and they also make it easy to share them.

PD Dr. Thomas Städtler (Project Leader)

A Definition of Digitization In the simplest of terms, digitization is turning something into bits and bytes, or 1’s and 0’s.

Digitization definition: any time you translate something into bits and bytes – for example, by scanning a photo or a document – you are digitizing that object.

Digitization所指的数字化简单的讲是将模拟信号/实物转换成数字形式，也就是转换成电脑能保存和处理的二进制“0”和“1”。比如将一张胶卷冲印的老照片扫描成数码照片，用手机拍一段视频等。这通常是第一步，要求公司了解其控制的数据的价值。

Despite the surprising lack of digital editions, the commonplace book, more than any other genre of writing, seems well suited to a digital format, since, by its very structure, it is a linked web of fragments that have been “coded” and “marked up” with metadata. For this reason, we have put much thought and planning into which tools to use and how design this digital edition.