After creating this blog over a week ago, I have finally got around to organizing my thoughts about digital history and blogging enough to take a stab at a post. The concept of digital history and the digitization of historical documents and artifacts is something I had never considered in great detail until recently.
This past year I began volunteering at the Dufferin County Museum and Archives, which is your typical local museum lacking in funding and reliant mostly upon the generosity of volunteers and the community. Yet, even in this small museum the digitization of history was beginning to become crucial to its existence. Many an hour has been spent at the DCMA, transferring paper records to computer files and now each new item is digitized and linked up to all existing items in the museum, using the Past Perfect Program. The fact that even small museums are seeing the value of digitization and the use of computers in dealing with history made me begin to consider the vast array of possibilities which technology can bring to the management, understanding, presentation and interpretation of history.
The idea of learning more about working with digital resources, the presentation of history on the web and the joining of computing and history in general seems essential to the changing historical field. And I am looking forward to learning more about digital history and all that it entails as the year progresses.
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