Regarding the Rozenweig essay, the assertion that future historians will suffer from an overabundance of information seems shortsighted. Even casual research can be made more difficult by the raw number of hits produced by a slightly too general google search. On such occasions, the user simply employs a more sophisticated search, i.e. more search terms, or tweaked boolean expressions. I expect as the corpus increases, the tools used to search it will become more sophisticated.

The Pitt Project represents an interesting new direction for digital archivists, as it takes the dangers of narrow digitization and makes them part of the project’s parameters. The Project focused on “Records as Evidence” instead of “information”. The example in the essay suggests that a social security number would be archived, while discussions of issues relating to social security numbers would be considered non-vital. Digitization in the absence of pertinent context seems a little bit like writing a new translation of one of the great histories or Julius Caesar or Tacitus (a worthy endeavor), but in the translation, removing all the prepositions. Imagine the difficulty of interpreting even a single chapter, to say nothing of large databases without context.