My history of digitization

Aside from class last Thursday, my experience with digitization doesn't really extend past digitizing for personal use -- digitizing old photographs for my parents, etc -- and then only on a pretty primitive level. I do remember my first digital camera, and I enjoyed playing around with the pictures I transferred to the computer. I thought it was so wonderful that somehow we were able to take pictures on one device and transfer them to another -- all without ever needing to produce a paper copy of the image (now, though, I do like to print out paper copies of some pictures). I've also done a lot of converting audio CD tracks to mp3s, but that's not exactly digitization. Last class was really my first experience using a dedicated and powerful digitization program to do genuinely useful and significant work, and it was neat to be able to play with it a little and see how it works.

I hope to work in a fine arts library someday, so at this point I'm pretty interested in audio digitization and preservation. I think digital music libraries are very cool -- I did a project last year focusing on the history of digital music libraries as used in academic libraries, both privately and for commercial use. I would love to learn more about the behind-the-scenes technicalities of these libraries and become more familiar with some of the issues related to them. I know copyright is probably the leading factor in the high cost of subscriptions to the commercial libraries (like the Naxos Music Library), but what about the private digital music libraries? Some colleges and universities have chosen to digitize their own music collections -- sometimes for convenience, and sometimes as a way of preservation -- and I'd like to learn more about how they actually go about doing that, and how practical it really is in the long run.