Digitisation and Us 

Part 2 : Digitisation and Us

In this 2^nd part of What is Digitisation? We will look at how digitisation has come to play a part of our lives such a work, academia and our personal lives. We will also go over why digitisation is important, the advantages as well as the disadvantages.   

Digitisation has come to play an important role in academia and libraries in terms of preserving the university’s intellectual property and the country’s culture and heritage. Universities such as UCT and WITS  now even have their own digitisation services as part of their library services. 

At work we use printers that have document feeder scanners or flatbed scanners to digitise paperwork to be able to share documents across departments and between employees and employers. 

We have also come to rely on digitisation when applying for jobs. For example, when we are applying for a job online and do not have a digital copy of a Z83 form, we can use our smartphones to scan the Z83 form once we are done filling in our information and turn it into a digital copy. We can do this thanks to applications that allow us to scan documents with our smartphones, the most popular application being Adobe Scan. There are many companies that now offer digitisation services to people, especially other businesses. Some of these companies include Sabinet, Metrofile and The Document Warehouse.

Adobe Scan of Z83 Form

 How to scan using Adobe Scan  

Advantages

• Digitisation has helped to preserve information, especially old and fragile information, and has made information more accessible and readily available for people to access and use at any time. 
• This is especially seen in the library, archival and academic environment due to the creation of digital libraries and repositories. 
• Digital libraries contain digital materials such as ebooks, ejournals, and audio-visual materials, they can also contain digital versions of old manuscripts and books that may not have been made available to people without the help of digitisation. Digital repositories, usually known as institutional repositories, contain the knowledge and research output of their academic institutions, making this knowledge available for anyone to access and use. 
• Digitisation also helps to create space regarding the storage of documents and materials as a business or company can get their collections and documentation digitised. 

Disadvantages

• While digitisation has brought with it many benefits, there are also many challenges and disadvantages. 
• Digitisation can be very costly. To get materials digitised can be very costly, whether you are doing it by yourself or hiring a company to do it for you. 
• There is also the issue of copyright laws and intellectual property; while digitising materials it is important to adhere to the copyright laws and intellectual property of one’s country. This can affect libraries and archives in terms of accessing materials and allowing their users to access this information and materials. 
• A reliance on technology can be problematic as information can be lost if not organised correctly, if there are no back-ups of information or the company’s systems are hacked and data is wiped.