“We don’t want to talk you out of digitizing the past, but rather encourage you to carefully weigh the problems and expenses against the benefits.”
In this Digital History document, the quote above stuck out to me because although it started off saying we don’t want to talk you out of digitalizing the past- that seems to be exactly what they are doing. I, however, am on the fence on this subject. I thought it was interesting that Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s original plans for the city of Washington are so fragile that they cannot be physically handled but are on the Internet for any average Joe to examine. When I entered this subject into the search engine bar, the majority of links were written in third person rather than in L’Enfant’s own handwriting as it is in the Library of Congress. This particular transformation into digitalization lost some of its antiqueness and value when printed onto a web page rather than written in first person point of view on the original paper. Conversely, digitalizing this document now makes it possible, as stated before, for individuals to look at it since it can no longer be touched.
Digitalizing important pieces of history allows society to be informed and educated about topics that otherwise might have never been explored had they never been put on the web. L’Enfant’s document is only available in Washington DC and before being digitalized, could only been viewed by those who had the money, vehicle, and accessibility to visit the Library of Congress. Using myself as a prime example, I had no idea a document of this sorts even existed, nonetheless, had never heard of a man named L’Enfant until I read this document and did some minimal research. Digitalizing the past is an easier and faster way to do research without the tedious process of scanning through encyclopedias, traveling to different libraries, etc while still learning the facts.
On the other hand, I can see where this method gets sticky due to the immense amount of people that have access to update the Internet and provide false information on a subject. This however, can be easily avoided if one knows how to test the validity of a website and author and the correct way to conduct research, which is something I hope to learn on improving in this class!