On Christmas Day, 1995, my family bought an IBM Aptiva personal computer. We didn't get Internet until the next summer in 1996, but we mostly used it to play games such as Solitaire, Myst, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? , and Silent Steel (a full motion video game). My first experience of digitization I can remember began with weather tracking coordinates from Hurricane Roxanne available online from our local news stations. I guess it sounds somewhat silly for an 8 year old girl at the time to be interested in tracking coordinates for hurricanes, but at my house we owned a cork board picturing the gulf coast and we would track the coordinates of a hurricane as it approached land with push pins. I found it fascinating that I could find the old coordinates online, after the fact, and subsequently re-track on our cork board if I wanted to.
Like two of my other classmates, my academic interest in digitization was piqued when Quinn came to speak to our Intro to Preservation class about this exact subject. Until that point, what we had read in that class was mostly theoretical, but it finally felt somewhat tangible after he spoke to us. Following the presentation, I felt motivated to go out right then and there and find and save all those treasure troves of photos, audio, film, etc. on backlog at institutions that are in danger of being lost forever. Thus, after this initial excitement wore off and considering that most content is now born-digital, it seemed more than appropriate that getting hands-on experience would be appropriate for any kind of preservation career.
Sooo...from my experiences in this class, I would like to apply it in the museum world. In a 2004 survey of technology and digitization in museums more than 50% of museums responded that digitizing photographs was a top priority for them. Regardless of statistics, digitization is relevant in most every cultural heritage institution and I want to be a play an educated part in it.
