Practicing Digitization at the National Library of Israel

Abstract

Sharon Ringela* & Rivka Ribakaa Department of Communication, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Israel Address correspondence to Sharon Ringel, Department of Communication, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel 31905, Israel. E-mail: sharonringel@gmail.comIn this article we offer some analytical comments on the digitization of the National Library of Israel (NLI), which has been converting materials into digital formats since 2007. This research draws upon Actor-Network Theory and is based on participant observation within the Digitization Center of the NLI. Specifically, we ask how human and non-human actors—namely scanning technicians and graphic designers, scanners, manuscripts and ephemera—are co-embedded in the production of the corpus that will likely be the basis for historical accounts in the future; and what their inter-relationships can tell us about the digitization of heritage.

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