April 22, 2001 - New York Times

             Digitized History

                 One of the great themes in this digital age is the dream of
                 perfect reproducibility, the ability to create generation
             after generation of digital copies with no loss of information.
             Binary code has also become the Esperanto of equivalence,
             translating music, words and images into a common, readily
             manipulated language. It has dissolved the fundamental
             differences between text and illustration. The time when
             photographs by Jacob Riis, the journalist and social reformer,
             had to be turned into wood engravings in order to be printed in
             The New York Tribune seems almost as distant as the time,
             only a few years ago, when copiers and printers were entirely
             different machines, when combining text and illustration meant
             an exacting outing with scissors and paste and a bottle of
             Wite-Out.

             But digital technology can perfectly replicate only what is
             already digital. At home, you can now turn out exact copies of
             existing CD recordings. But even in the best digital recordings
             of live performance there is a loss of grain, of substance. You
             can scan a photograph or the pages of a book, but the original
             remains tangibly different, if only because it was printed on
             different stock with inks of different composition. There may be
             only the ghost of a difference between the original and the copy,
             but these are the ghosts that matter. In the texture of old paper or
             the warmth of old ink, there lurks something irreproducibly rich,
             a kind of information that cannot be detached from the stuff
             itself.

             Meanwhile, stuff itself is in serious trouble. Consider the fate of
             the Bettmann archive, which began as a collection of images
             recorded on film smuggled out of Nazi Germany by Otto
             Bettmann and grew into a collection of 17 million historic
             photographs, now in the possession of Bill Gates. When Mr.
             Gates bought the archive, the plan was to digitize all its images.
             But the time it will take to digitize those pictures has proved to
             be longer than many of the pictures themselves will last, unless
             they are properly stored. As a result, the archive is destined for
             archival refrigeration 220 feet below ground in a limestone
             mine not far from Pittsburgh.

             From a curatorial standpoint, the decision to place 17 million
             photographs into protracted cryogenic hibernation is exactly the
             right one. It is also a sensible hedge against the shifting
             technology of digitization. But it has the unwelcome
             disadvantage of hiding away from us a more nuanced vision of
             history, a vision that is more expansive, more ambiguous than
             the endless replication of the quarter-million Bettmann images
             that were digitized before this decision was made.

             At least those originals will be preserved. According to
             Nicholson Baker, old newspapers have not been so lucky. In his
             chilling new book, "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on
             Paper," Mr. Baker chronicles the dire effects of the ideology of
             replication. With an ill-founded distrust of aging paper,
             librarians in the past half-century have microfilmed most of the
             old newspapers in their collections and then discarded the
             originals, as if there were no difference between a coil of
             microfilm, itself vulnerable to deterioration, and a properly
             bound volume of, say, The New York Tribune in the days when
             Riis was its police reporter.

             It is easy enough to point to the inadequacies of microfilm and
             to argue that new digital technologies will produce copies of
             higher quality. But, as Mr. Baker argues, when all the
             newspaper originals have been destroyed, the only recourse is
             to make a digital copy of a microfilm. The growing urge to
             digitize and then discard the books in libraries is also based on
             the ideology of replication. There is nothing wrong with
             digitizing books and newspapers as long as it never becomes a
             pretext to destroy the originals. They are the real matter of
             which real history is made.