Cohen and Brown review

The three articles that we were assigned for this week explored the pros and cons of digital collections and the prevalence of this type of archive within the 21st century. For both Cohen and Brown, a digital archive provide a relevant medium in which people, who already use the web as a way to express their emotions and thoughts about an event, can contribute and search through in new and exciting ways.

In his article, “History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Daniel Cohen describes the web as an immature medium but one that also possesses the ability to open up conversation among people all over the world. I was reminded of a class I am taking now, Digitizing History. In it, we learned that the main role of the archive is to facilitate and increase the access that researchers and even the general public has to primary sources within the archives. Cohen speaks directly to this by saying that the web allows interested parties to access an essay or photograph at any time, in any place and provides a way for the user to search specific keywords or phrases. This would seem to be an archivist’s dream if it is true that access is their main concern. Cohen also believes that a pro for digital collections is its ability to combine different mediums in order to obtain the full breadth of a subject. His example of the 9/11 digital archives shows that oral interviews, audio, photographs, and emails are all combined in order to a complete story of how Americans reacted to that day. A book could only provide a fraction of that information and certainly could not involve audio or video into its work. In this way, digital collections are unique and exciting.

In his other article, “The Future of Preserving the Past”, however, Cohen also brings up the cons of digital collections. Unlike the traditional ink on paper, digital mediums such as CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc can become obsolete much faster and are more likely to fail upon the first onsite of wear and tear. CDs may be able to hold much more information than a book is, but when it is scratched, all that information can be lost. Also, because of their astounding amount of storage space, digital collections lack the refinement that physical archives often have. The archives have to almost edit what they accession into the library because they know they only have so much physical space in which to keep it. This leads them to be very careful about the kinds and amount of knowledge they accept. Digital collections instead accept everything, pertinent or not and can result in false, unrelated, or scattered documents within it.

Joshua Brown, like Cohen, ultimately sees the web as a worthy medium to facilitate learning and dialogue between both historians and the general public. He claims that our understanding of the past is based on visual images rather than textual and therefore web archives, which contain a dearth of video and photographic documents, are more likely to present the past in an understandable way. In his P.T. Barnum CD-ROM, he hoped to merge entertainment with education so that people are achieving a goal and yet still learning about their history. Although this project ultimately failed, I believed it represents a new way of thinking about history and the web. It showed history, albeit specific events in history, in a visually pleasing package that attracted those who may not normally sit down and read a history book. Ultimately, if Brown could fix the CD-ROM so that it allowed for active inquiry, as he put it, I think he would have a winning combination of both history and the web.