ISBN 978-91-981654-6-3 (printed version) ISBN 978-91-981654-7-0 (pdf) ISSN 1103-6990 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-881 Skrifter från Valfrid, nr 59 D O C TO R A L TH ESI S DOCTO R A L TH ESI S Li br ar y a nd In fo rm at io n S cie nc e
Heritage institutions today increasingly rely on digital formats for access, use and re-use of their collections. Books and other text-based documents, previously accessed on loca-tion in libraries are now transferred into digital format and managed, distributed, and engaged as binary encoded representations.
The digitisation process is conditioned by technology but also by the interest and ide-als guiding its design and operation. Our use of digital resources is often shaped by a rather uncritical acceptance of the reproduction on face value, thereby ignoring both the technical particulars of the binary format as well as the consequences of the digital trans-mission on a conceptual level. The question of the capacity of a reproduction to serve as a substitute for the source document, as an enrichment or a supplement to a particular document or collection is not always easily answered. Still, as digital representations increasingly are regarded as primary sources this question is gaining in importance. This thesis focuses on the digitisation of text-based documents and how the conversion influences the informative capacity of the digital resource. Based on two empirical stu-dies – an analysis of the components in the digitisation process and an interview study with researchers who rely on digital resources – it seeks to outline a conceptual frame-work that structures the relation between the source document and its reproduction, as conditioned by the digitisation process.
HOW REPRODUCTIVE IS
A REPRODUCTION?
Lars Björk
La rs B jö rk H O W RE PR O D U C TIV E IS A R EP R O D U C TIO N ?Lars Björk works at the National library of Sweden. How
reproductive is a reproduction? Digital transmission of text-based documents is his doctoral thesis.
