One digital collection that I found that interests me is a site that contains facts, maps, photos, videos, news, travel and the culture of New Zealand. Maybe it’s due to the fact that I went to school on the south island for a semester and didn’t watch a baseball game for the entire five months, but I think it’s amazing the information about different cultures and lifestyles that you can find out about at anytime because of the digitization process. Digitizating this information can make more people aware of the Maori culture where before, searching for New Zealand may have brought up many more hits on Lord of the Rings than the culture that has existed far longer than the hobbit movies.
Maybe if I had been more aware of the vast amount of information found in solid and well made digital collections, I would have realized some of the small intricacies of the islands instead of the larger picture. So maybe one thing we can do as librarians is to be sure to push these digital collections to the public. While we want them to still visit the physical libraries, maybe with our title of ‘information professionals’ we should make sure that the public knows about all the collections that are available to them, whether they are physical or digital? I maybe would have entered New Zealand with a deeper appreciation of the culture, history and beauty of what happened around me every day if I had accessed these digital collections… I should probably lay most of the blame on myself for not searching out the possible digital collections about New Zealand, but as an undergrad who still wasn’t sure I where I was going to end up after Austin College and as someone who really only used the Internet to check email and baseball scores, I didn’t know these collections existed….
