Digitizing for Accessibility

We live in an ever-changing society in which advancing technologies have proven to benefit human accessibility in many ways than one.  In the museum field, technology has become a growing aspect to visitor engagement, documentation and research. While museum professionals and archivists make it not only their job to process artifacts, but in some cases, make them digitally accessible online. These online artifacts are classified as digital libraries; online tools used for research and descriptive search engines to interest individuals without the need of the physical interaction at the place of learning. This thesis will include a well assessed and outlook on the current digital libraries online, websites such as the New York Heritage, the Rochester Public Library’s website under local history, and the Rochester Voices website, where digital collections are currently being processed upon, in order to understand the steps of digitizing and how it has changed throughout the years. With volunteer time at the Rochester Public Library’s Local History department and the access to the Raymond L. Rohner papers collection on file, the understanding of how digital libraries are accessed, created and useful to online visitors will be beneficial to future researchers, and the step-by-step process of digitization will reveal how libraries and museums in the future will take advantage of these new technologies. 

Photo from Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County • Historic Monographs Collection

(http://www.libraryweb.org/~digitized/books/My_dear_Else.pdf)