Happy Friday! Back again with another blog post!
For my Exploring Digital History class, we have been reading Ian Milligan’s “Age of Abundance,” a book about the significant changes the Internet is making on historians and our society. A concept that this book discussed is the difference between digital and paper resources when studying history or learning information. This made me question…which is better?
Before the emergence of the Internet, everything was originally documented in books, newspapers, magazines, journals and many other types of paper documentation. If historians wanted to research specific information, they would have to dig through library shelves and flip through pages to possibly find the information they need. Key word…“possibly.” Who knows how long this would take! All I know is I would get distracted by the pretty, old books instead of the ones I need – oops!
But that’s only the beginning of the process. If a historian wanted to SAVE the paper documentation if they found it…that was a whole other process in itself of scanning and printing on specialized machines.
This long process was cut super short thanks to the access digital resources provides us with. Today, we can find almost any kind of documentation or resources at our fingertips with just a few words in a search engine. Instantly, thousands of links pop up, making it so much easier to find what we are looking for, find it fast, and maybe find new things in the meantime. It can provide us with resources we may not have had access to before and explore new outlets as well. There are all kinds of Internet archives that categorize and organize resources too, making this process even easier. As the book said, content is being saved “every millisecond of every day.” So surely you find SOMETHING you are looking for!
Along with this, all it takes to save resources is one click of a button and we can have any resource saved or printed. None of that bending the book, putting in film or scanning nonsense!
However, there are some negative aspects about historians relying on digital resources. Although “web crawlers” are constantly saving content…they can’t possibly save everything. Also, content can also be intentionally or accidentally deleted, or as the book says, “With a line of code here or there, a website can be forgotten forever or included in the ever-growing global archive.” This takes away historian’s access to resources – making the Internet not as reliable.
Paper resources, on the other hand, were made to last a very long time. According to Age of Abundance, most books today can survive for centuries because they are printed on acid-free paper. Their durability has allowed us to have a reliable source that can not be taken away as easily as a website can (unless you burn, damage or lose the book I guess? Let’s not!). There is also little to no maintenance to keep up a book or other paper resource – websites require active maintenance in order for them to stay online. Paper resources have been and always will be here. We can’t say that is true for digital resources.
Both digital and paper resources have their benefits and challenges. I guess it depends on the historian to decide which is best!
