Born digital? It is very weird when you think about it. What is it, exactly? All works of artificial human authorship that can be entered directly into a computer device of some sort. If, however, it cannot be “directly entered,” it cannot be considered “born digital.” Now this can get quite tricky. Photographs can be “born digital,” but this does not extend to the objects that have been photographed.
20180706/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born-digital
Interesting article/viewpoint here. “Digital surrogate” is the term used for scanned copies here.
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Footnote: But the point in hand. Manufacturing only happens to a specific tolerance, and once that tolerance is reached, the manufactured object is deemed merchantable. For aged objects, you can also artificially accelerate aging of an object based off of its use characteristics.
So, the point about a digital surrogate not being able to fully replace an original artifact? Not true. I would say that yes, in a minority “professional historian” profession it is, but not true in general if you look at the full industry.
Suffice it to say, the only extended information about an original object not within a digital copy would be those details that normally wouldn’t be manufactured: wear and tear from use, traces about the age of an object, etc.
But, this is a great quote:
Digitization of cultural heritage materials is changing the ways in which collections are used and accessed… Many factors will come into play when evaluating the ‘value’ of digital resources, but these factors may help in assessing when digitizing collections can be cost effective. Valuable digital resources, which will bring prestige to the institutions that create and maintain them, will be those that can support scholarship without any loss of the benefits of working with the originals. With no definitive evidence base to give concrete numbers about the economic value of digitization to an institution, assessing the value of digital resources is a question of also assessing whether digitization is also causing information to ‘lose’ some of its value: what is the loss to scholarship if electronic resources cannot be browsed in the same way as conventional library stacks?[9]
20180706/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_artifactual_value
Yeah, but at the end of the day, I really do have to admit: professional archivists are in some sense an illegitimate, or shady and underhanded, profession. They are not archivists in the pure and unbiased sense, they do have an obvious slant toward commercial gain. In the end, the professional archivist working for the non-profit is not much different than the professional archivist working for the for-profit. Hobbyist archivists are a little less biased, but even they are biased. Aggregating multiple hobbyist archivists is still less biased, but still even then you are left with a distinct bias of human nature.