Sessione Proposta: Selection and Memory

Common practice for organizations who want to increase access to collections is to digitize the popular items within a collection. Does your budget really keep you from digitizing more? Are you trying to conserve money while working through the project, which might keep the remainder of the collection off the Internet? Since many people access the digital collection from far away via the Internet, and might not ever come see the rest of the collection, don’t we run the risk of changing the public’s memory of an event or person by emphasizing the importance of one representation of a particular memory by regulating the others in the collection to the unseen background? I am interested in talking with others about whether we are forming a new historical memory through our digitization efforts, and if there should be a policy for best practice that includes as much of the collection as possible.