Lara Corona

By Lara Corona

Collections are the heart of museums, born for anyone’s benefit. In order to ensure people enjoy collections, museums operate as the stewards of items to preserve them for today and future generations. Due to the growing technological improvements and the advent of the Internet, collections have been made available for the audience’s benefit, both offline and online. This paper aims to provide the reader with a general picture of the matter. For this purpose, it illustrates the development of digitization since its first steps, when cultural institutions started approaching the usage of computers in the 1960s. Then, this study focuses on the main advantages and disadvantages of digitization. For instance, this practice contributes to preserving items through digital surrogates. Additionally, collections are made widely accessible-albeit virtually- thereby democratizing them. Nevertheless, it is argued that digital content might trigger the loss of the “aura” typically associated with seeing original items due to their uniqueness. Furthermore, digitization is a resource and time-consuming process whose outcome is prone to incurring the phenomenon of rapid “technological quicksand.” Finally, this study deals with revenue streams from digital content, such as merchandise and image licensing sale.

Part of the book: Aspects of Digital Libraries