Since the invention of the written word, mankind has recorded our history one event at a time by writing it down. As a result, man has spent countless hours poring over cave drawings, scrolls and manuscripts in hopes of learning from those who had the foresight to record the events that were important to them in their microcosm of time.

Technologies developed in the last half of the 20th century have provided us with the unique opportunity to not only record the vast knowledge accumulated in the world’s library through digitization, but to make that information available to the world via a plethora of delivery methods.

Think of the possibilities–what if all the world’s medical research journals could be digitized and made available to today’s researchers in a data set allowing them to cross reference modern medical techniques with Tupachiy, the ancient Peruvian alchemy of gathering and mixing the herbs and different elements, thus creating a specific treatment for each individual and malady?

There are a myriad of simultaneous scanning programs digitizing books, newspapers, family records and the like, most of these programs are executed under the guise of sharing knowledge when in actuality, they are in fact digitizing mountains of content to further their own interests.

Google is scanning millions of books with a number of libraries around the world, in hopes of making that content searchable through the Google search engine and ultimately profiting by the sale of the books. Amazon has their own digitization program, making snippets of books viewable through Amazon.com solely for the purpose of selling books online, and repurposing the book and selling it exclusively through their eBook reader the Kindle.
Google’s efforts although monumental in size, have fallen far short when it comes to quality. Their efforts being centered on their search engine are not concerned with capturing all the information contained within the books they are currently digitizing. Scholar after scholar has expressed their disappointment with Google’s efforts. Researchers are finding numerous pages missing, pages folded over, poorly executed OCR rendering the information woefully incomplete.

It’s baffling to me that quality isn’t more important when it comes to the digitization of recorded history. I shudder to think where we would be today if Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium had every third page removed before it went to print. Man most likely would have never set foot on the moon. Copernicus’s recorded theories had immense influence on later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.

We owe it to our children and future generations to digitize all the world’s printed history at the highest quality available, not only for today’s technologies, but for technologies not yet even conceived, let alone invented.