digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

I only attended one session today, the one on "User Content". Elisam Magara from the East African School of Library and Information Science in Kampala, Uganda spoke about his gap analysis on how indiginous knowledge (IK) is recorded, organized, and preserved in Uganda. Karen Worcman gave an overview of the international Museum of the Person and announced that they are starting a wiki today to expand people's opportunity to tell their own life stories. Rachel Coldicutt and Katie Streten from the Victoria & Albert Museum and Channel 4 respectively talked about those organizations' collaboration on the Every Object Tells a Story website, which allows the public to post personal stories about items in the V&A collection. Finally, Beth Greenhorn from the Library and Archives Canada spoke on Project Naming, which uses digitization to help identify Inuit photographed in the early part of this century.

The session was outstanding. All four topics demonstrated how technology is making a real impact on people around the globe, even in regions that do not have access to the wealth of technology that most of us take for granted in North America. Listening to the speakers made it clear to me that really meaningful content easily justifies the high cost of putting information online.