Digitization dilema - NYT article

I was struck by one of the recurring points made in the article - that the new generation of researchers are not willing to travel and study original source material. The author of the article believes that unless the material is digitized, researchers are not going to make the effort to access it. It is true that a document or a film reel that is digitized will get a huge bump in exposure, as illustrated by the example of WWII and NASA film reels digitized at NARA and the library of Congress. But I still think that researchers who are only willing to access materials online are amateurs. I mean, we are not talking about looking up movie times or restaurant reviews. This is scholarly work we are talking about, our intellectual wealth. Yeah, while we are in college we all write papers using Wikipedia for our main reference because we don't have the time to search out books and articles on our own. But if you are a professional and you call yourself a researcher, the limitations of the Web as a research tools should be fairly obvious to you. If the scholarship pursuit is serious, the researcher will find a way to get a hold of as much of the story as possible, whether the sources have been digitized or not.

If you want to look up your aunt Betsy's birth certificate, fine go online, don't go to Minnesota. But if you want to write a new definitive chapter on race in America in 1770's.... you might have to spend some time in an archive. Toni Morrison spent 5 years researching historic documents from that time period in archives and libraries across the United States before writing her new novel A Mercy. This is how long it took her to become comfortable with the historic period she wanted to write about. A Mercy is a relatively short novel and it is a work of fiction. Yet she put in the effort, so that her characters might sound authentic, so that she is not perpetuating blatant historic untruths if she can help it. Why the effort? Because she is good at what she does!

Another point that struck me in the article is the point that is completely missing from it - how in the world are we going to preserve all this digital data? Who is going to organize the multitudes of scans? Who is going to be charged with the stewardship of the cultural heritage in digital
format? After all, the digitized information can only remain accessible by the public if the servers, or wherever the files are kept, are diligently maintained by dedicated professionals, and if the file formats are migrated, when they become technologically obsolete.

If the stewards of the electronic/digital resources are going to be the people, who had financed the digitization process in the first place, this could lead to some tricky issues. Do you really want the Church of the Latter Day Saints Genealogical Society or Google to be the main stakeholder in your digitization initiative? What if they have agendas other than preservation of the material? (aside from making a profit)