Who are the Digital Pioneers?
In short, they are people who were a part of, and influenced, the direction of cultural heritage digitization in the formative years between 1994 and 2005.
In 2005, Clifford Lynch wrote an article in DLib magazine called “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries.” Prior to looking ahead, he did a brief bit of looking back,
CNI, 1997
quickly summarizing the history of the rather vague term “digital libraries.” He admitted that there was as yet a “poorly chronicled pre-history and early history” of the field. That comment, plus the opportunity to host the IMLS’s Web Wise conference in Denver later this year led a group of us to think that maybe this was an area that needed some attention. From that came the idea of Digital Pioneers, a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005) and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were an integral part of it all.
CDP, 1999
The digital future in which we now live was the created by a combination of the work of individuals, organizations, and public and private policy. That the scholar’s desktop envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945 looks amazingly like the digital research library resources we know today is because of long conversations that developed into shared visions. These intellectual and policy interactions among , individuals, organizations, government agencies, practitioners, and researchers created the digital “library” we know today.
Although there were glimmerings of pre-history reaching as far back as the 1960s, the great age of experimentation lasted roughly from 1994 though 2005. It was not until the early 1990s that as Clifford Lynch again says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.” By 2005, Lynch further notes, funding and support for “…the construction of prototype systems [was] at an end…” and “the novelty of constructing digital libraries as a research end in itself [had] run its course.”
Lester Levy Sheet Music, 1998
By 2005, digitization had become a discipline with standards, practices, protocols, organizations and governance. It moved beyond the mere creation of content to focus on topics like preservation, data curation, sustainability, large-scale aggregation, information exchange, and cyberinfrastructure.
The legacy of standards, practices, mindsets, and approaches developed in that decade informed a entirely new generation of digital librarians, archivists, and theorists and laid a foundation that has become the cornerstone of a profession and has made it into course syllabi in academic institutions around the world.
The scholarly publications, white papers, and conference proceedings tell the official story of the era, but what we want to do is get to the personal stories of how people got involved and what they hoped to do, and if their vision turned into reality.
