The Trouble With Digitizing History

At the end of July, the Associated Press and British Movietone released 550,000 clips of historical footage to YouTube. More countries are undertaking or planning similar digitization projects as VHS tapes, audiocassettes, film, and other aging media carriers become unsalvageable in the next couple of decades. One can only hope that that work would also appear on the Internet.

The Library of Congress's collections comprise more than 450 languages, representing most of the world’s cultures, so its preservation efforts won’t only affect America’s ability to remember its cultural past. With every innovation in communications -- first the radio, then the television, and now the Internet -- a country’s media memory has increasingly spilled outside of its borders. Digitization will only speed up this cultural spread.