Today I had the pleasure of linking the needs of archives-using scholars to Avengers fans in Japan during a serious discussion about archives digitization.
The key is that both demographics have developing expectations that are at odds with reality, based on their expectation that the things they want and/or need will behave like the rest of the internet.
Specifically, scholars are becoming used to most everything they need, from books to academic journals, being available online. Media fans are likewise used to finding what they want, either via streaming media or downloads. In a world where it takes all of five minutes to upload a video to YouTube, there is an expectation by users across the grid to have resources available to them immediately.
The Transformative Works and Cultures journal posted on its Symposium Blog a concise essay about overseas fans dealing with regional releases (On regional releases and disrupting international fandoms), and how this encourages piracy. Fans in Japan will not get to see the Avengers until it official opens there in August; in the mean time, they have to live through three months of spoilery blog, tumblr, pinterest and facebook posts (not to mention twitter discussion) about the movie. They want to play too, and most of us (including the writer of the Symposium Blog post) have absolutely no idea why on earth it takes three months to get a movie from Hollywood to Tokyo. Are they sending the original servers containing the digital data for the movie over by cargo boat? I think we all are aware, intellectually, that there are probably some legal and copyright issues going on, but for the most part it is pretty obvious that this is a hold over from 25 years ago when staggering releases worldwide made financial sense, because that was how long it took for word of mouth to travel.
Likewise, scholars are fully aware of the fact that digitizing consists of more than slapping a piece of paper on a scanner and hitting a button. They know that, but it doesn’t stop them from saying, as one did recently to an archival colleague of mine who was at a conference, that archives “just need to digitize everything.”
The Claude Pepper Collection, which is held at the archives where I work, is about 400 linear feet of documents and artifacts. We’d LOVE to digitize all of that. Get us a team of team ten people, a year, and about $50,000 worth of scanning equipment and computers and we’ll get right on that.
Which is to say, there is a valid reason the collection hasn’t been digitized. There may even be a valid reason for why the Avengers won’t open in Japan until August. But users of digital media don’t accept those answers, because those answers don’t fit their reality, which is “everything available, all the time.”
There is no one to blame for this conundrum, but it is wise for us to realize that user expectations across the board have changed and continue to change. Digitizing needs to be factored into collections processing from the beginning, because while we can explain why an older collection has not been made available online (and that is the key phrase here, “made available,” not “digitized”) we are not going to get any more slack for not digitizing newer collections than Marvel is getting for not opening the Avengers world wide on the same day. Everyone knows it is possible to do, after all.
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