Grafton

I was struck by the Kevin Kelly quote because it reminded of some of the quotes from the Wright article where people were so adamant about how a given project was going to bring about a technotopia. That association that I made in some ways signifies one of the big points that Grafton was trying to make about how digitalization is just another step in the process of advancing information services not the be all and end all of them.

Another thing that Grafton does in this article is points out the imperfections of large companies like Google and Microsoft’s digitalization methods. Not only considering the imperfections at the scanning stage, Grafton takes into account the copyright issue which in some cases these companies are violating at the scanning stage not to mention how they use the copy. Most interesting was the discussion of what kind of collection these companies overlook and who isn’t forgetting them. These companies are overlooking areas that could really benefit from digitalization points to the bottom line that they business that need to make money at the end of the day. Libraries and similar non-profit organizations are more suited to decide what groups of texts need to be prioritized for digitalization. This issue also relates back to the Internet’s affect on libraries study which mentioned the digital divide because if groups of people don’t have Internet or computer access then they can’t make use of digitized content. Grafton emphasizes that libraries have to solve access problems on these various levels.