I decided to look into the Museum of Flight in Seattle Washington. I recently went there and thought that they would have some interesting pieces of media to look at. I went into their collections sections and started looking around until I found their collections related to space. I then chose the “First International Space Docking Certificate”. This certificate was made in order to commemorate when both the US Apollo and USSR Soyuz locked their spacecraft’s into orbit. It was supposed to be a way to kind of bring these two countries together (at least in space), as way to set aside differences in order for advancements to be made regarding the people’s interests. All in all, a very connecting and nice sentiment of a document.
The document is yellowish, and I imagine that the originals where written on a kind of paper. The picture allows the user to be able to zoom in on the document, and is very detailed and in a high resolution. Obviously, the document was been digitized (or I wouldn’t have been able to see it), with the museum also adding a section labeled, “Digitized Materials: This collection has been digitized in its entirety”. Interestingly, this collection only contains this document, which I find kind of weird. I do think that I achieved it’s intended purpose. This collection was part of their larger space collection, which revolves around the Moon Landing and Space Race era, which this document is definitely a part of. There is no information regarding to if the item is actually on display, or how it is displayed.
The only preservation or maintenance issues that I can think of for the media file would be to have a back up, in case the file that they use for the website gets corrupted. This can be done in many ways, flashdrives, clouds, and files on different servers can all help minimize that risk.
Question: Can you think of anything that should be excluded from digitized items?
The primary things that would need to be excluded from digitized items is private documents, which the owners want preserved but not made available to the general public. an example would be a transcript or documents belonging to spiritual leaders whose knowledge should only be passed on to their successors, but the original documents might be held in trust with the museum for safe keeping.
I don’t think there should be a limit on what’s digitized – it’s pretty much everything these days. Health records, vehicle registrations, school records, historic documents – it seems like everything is already digitized. However, what’s made public is a different story, and obviously, personal information should never be made public, at least until years have passed after the person has passed away.
Items that would violate a person’s rights such as personal information should be excluded unless they have consent. Even then, there are some things that should not be included even with consent, such as cultural information that is supposed to be passed down generation to generation like Korovin mentioned as well as information on children.
I do think some thing should be excluded from the digitized like anything the artist, creator, or author requested not be online or shown to the public. Just as some of the previous comments mentioned I agree. Great post!