Sleep through your morning lecture? It may be no big deal. For the past four years or so, students have been able to watch online streams of particular classes via Electronic Reserve (Eres). It’s just one example of digitization: the exponentially increasing trend towards making online copies of academic and library materials.

At Washington University, digitization has assumed increased importance. Shirley Baker, dean of University Libraries, reports that plans for more and more online materials are in the works. The focus will be on scanning old works that are out of copyright and those whose sole copy is owned by the University, as is the case for many items in the library’s rare books collection. Not only will this allow broader access, it will preserve sensitive materials as they age.

Baker estimates that it will cost a little over $10 to scan an average 300-page book.

“However, if we put up the right things and they’re heavily used, the access you would get would be worth far more than whatever it costs us to do it,” Baker said.

The digitization trend has been so important that companies are getting a piece of the action, hoping their online collections will translate into advertising dollars. Yahoo! and Google Inc., for example, have been competing with one another for market share in recent years. The latter announced plans last month to pay out-of-pocket for the digitization of the entire library collections at several universities around the country and abroad.

Goals for the coming year at Washington University include getting online access to the Henry Hampton Civil Rights film archive-preserving it before it decays-and institutionalizing digitization efforts.

“It will help us move towards a democratization of intellectual life,” said Baker. “There are bright people with interests everywhere. They’re not just in universities.”

Digitization is not without certain caveats, however. Not all collections are worth digitizing, as Baker points out, and no institution has yet to date made it cost-effective, in strictly monetary terms. But libraries, unlike businesses, have deeper concerns than nickels and dimes.

“Some people might say this means the end of libraries, but it’s not,” Baker said. “Libraries [will continue] to be committed to preserving materials. We preserve things because they’re important, not because they sell.”

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