Digitial Scholarship: Crag Saper Lecture

Craig Saper is a Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D Program at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland. Professor Saper's lecture was titled Digital Scholarship. Digital Scholarship provides information and commentary about digital copyright, scholarly communication, and other digital information and publications open to the public. Saper explained this ideas as an open access library, on the web, that is free to the public. Throughout the lecture Saper explained the difficulties with attempting to creat this digital scholarship in todays digital world. It only seems right that libraries should electronically scan books online and make them open to the public, if we have the technology. Unfortunately, the problem lies with money. If all scholarly books and journals are scanned onto the web and free for everyone, what is the incentive to those writers to produce such documents. Saper, an author himself, has been in this same situation. He believes even though authors should get some money for his work, the main goal of his writing is not for financial gain, but to let others read his work and learn from it. Overall, Saper believes we are heading to a Digital world more faster than you may think. We are shifting from the age of printed material, to the age of electronic material. Digital Scholarship is not against printed books, but apart of it. Saper believes Digital Scholarship gives people a different type of experience. Not only can you read a scanned journal online but you can also hear commentary on that specific journal. This gives another dimension that printed books do not offer. Although he believes digital scholarship is the way of the further, he urges the importance of appreciating the history of printed material and incorporating those ideas into todays digital scholarship.