On a Mission to Scan: Visibility, Value(s), and Labor in Large-Scale Digitization

Abstract

As an often overlooked piece of internet infrastructure, print media digitization at scale is pervasive yet elusive; its output is widely accessible but its transformative processes are largely invisible. Easy access to scanned media objects thus obscures important questions about the work required for their creation. Through two qualitative research projects on large-scale book digitization efforts—Google Books and FamilySearch Books—this dissertation investigates the labor of digitization. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework from science and technology studies and infrastructure studies, the research draws on the concepts of information labor and a feminist ethics of care to center and reframe digitization work. This approach animates the institutional and cultural values, labor, and information systems through which physical materials, digital conversion processes, and human workers cohere to produce large-scale digitization. The first project reconstructs the confluence of technical and cultural values and priorities that shaped the Google Books project through an analysis of project documentation and public statements. A new term, algorithmic digitization, describes Google’s commitment not only to scale and speed but to standardization, automation, and iterative improvement of scanned images. The relative inaccessibility of Google Books— a closed system with limited available documentation—serves as both context and jumping off point for the second project, which comprises the bulk of this dissertation research. The second project is an ethnography of FamilySearch Books, a book digitization project undertaken by the genealogy organization FamilySearch (the family history wing of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and public library partners. The research layers three project perspectives: institutional participants, social and technical divisions of labor in digitization roles and tasks, and the ways that digitization workers make sense of their work. FamilySearch Books constructs scanning as “meaningful” work that “anyone” can do; in practice, this means that the particulars of how “anyone” has been constructed shape what tasks are visible as “work.” The visibility of religious service often obscures skilled work undertaken by professional librarians, even as this work is also service-oriented. This includes coordination and support work, maintenance and repair work, work to connect users to digitized output, work to manage the evolving relationship between print and digital resources, and work to care for resources, patrons, and colleagues. The findings suggest that different configurations of work in large-scale digitization shape ideas about building, maintaining, or devaluing infrastructure. Lofty rhetoric about the democratizing power of digital access to print content overshadows the contingency, fragility, or often the proprietary characteristics of the infrastructure required to create and/or maintain this access. The dissertation foregrounds the latter so as to consider implications for long-term access provision and digital knowledge infrastructure development. By illuminating the mediating role played by workers who transform information from one medium to another, this work contributes to an emerging research literature on data, digital, or Internet labor. By expanding the definition of digitization work to include more actors and integrating an ethics of care, this research informs ongoing debates over the future of both public libraries and public librarianship.