Digitization is the conversion of analogue data and information into digital form. Scanning a photograph, recording a song as a file, keying a paper register into a database — all digitization. Nothing about how the organization works has changed yet.
The three words the guide gives you
- Digital preservation — keeping digital content usable over decades, as formats and media die.
- Digital archives — organised collections of digitized or born-digital material, made findable.
- Digital reformatting — converting material from one format to another, often to keep it readable.
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Paper lasts for centuries with nobody looking after it. A digital file needs looking after all the time, because the thing that can open it keeps disappearing. That is the surprising bit, and examiners like it.
Four ways digital material is lost
Media decay
Discs come apart in layers, drives fail, tape loses its magnetism. And nothing warns you when it happens.
Format obsolescence
The file survives but nothing can open it — a word-processor format from thirty years ago.
Hardware obsolescence
No drive still reads the disk, so the media surviving is beside the point.
Link rot
The material was never copied, only linked to, and the site is gone.
The paper and its digital copy on two timelines, with the four ways the copy can be lost marked on it.
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The implication: Digitizing a collection does not save it. It starts a job that never ends: moving the files to newer formats, again and again. An archive that digitizes and then stops has turned something permanent into something temporary.
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Against that cost, something real changes: what a collection can do once it is data instead of a shelf of objects.
| Before digitization | After |
|---|---|
| You must travel to the object | Anyone with a connection can see it |
| Handling the original damages it | The original can be shelved permanently |
| Searching means reading | Full-text and image search across everything |
| One reader at a time | Unlimited simultaneous access |
| Loss is permanent | Copies in several places survive one disaster |
Real-world examples you can name
Digitizing heritage collections — Google Arts & Culture from 2011; Notre-Dame laser scans used after the 2019 fire
Museums and monuments are photographed and laser-scanned at high resolution and published online. Detailed scans of Notre-Dame made before the fire informed its reconstruction — digitization as preservation, not just access.
Who it affected: People who will never travel to the collection, and conservators rebuilding what burned.
Digitization is not neutral: Someone chooses what gets scanned first, and what is scanned is what later gets found, cited and taught. The unscanned quietly becomes invisible.
How this is tested — you have to define digitization precisely and then weigh what it costs against what it opens up. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part a: define digitization, or identify a benefit
- Part c: evaluate an organization's decision to digitize
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: analyse how a source describes an archive's purpose
- Q4: synthesise sources on access against preservation
The trap: digitization and digitalization: They are different words in the guide and examiners hold you to it. Digitization converts the material; digitalization changes the organization. Use the wrong one and the answer reads as confusion.
Define the term digitization.
Model answer plan
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Evaluate a national library's decision to digitize its entire newspaper collection.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.