Info 202 Fall 2011

Prior to the digitization movement, there were two obstacles of information discovery. The first, barriers of awareness, refers to the information that we cannot access because we do not know it exists. The second, barriers of accessibility, deals with the information that we know exists, but is out of our reach. “Rare” physical resources were automatically valuable because of the barriers of accessibility. 

Digitization changed the semantic meaning of the word “rare” by bringing rare cultural physical resources to the internet. The information of these rare physical resources became widely accessible to anyone who could access the internet. This, effectively, disassociated value with scarcity. While digitization helped to solve the barriers of accessibility, it worsened the barriers of awareness by increasing the total amount of information we had available to us. Additionally, a third obstacle, the barrier of motivation emerged. The massive amounts of information accessible to us requires time and motivation to sift through it and find what is valuable. In the digitization era, a “rare” piece of information is something that takes more effort to find. Oftentimes valuable information is hidden by systems of information retrieval. For example, the rankings of Google’s search results are based on how popular a webpage is, and how many other webpages have linked to it.

Maria Popova calls herself a “cultural curator” and runs the website Brain Pickings. She argues that curators are necessary to overcome the barriers of awareness problem. Furthermore, curators can share information in the context of how it affects us in current events and ideals. Popova believes that curation is a necessary addition to digitization. That is, digitization lowers the barriers of accessibility, and curation lowers the barriers of awareness, so as to dig up the “rare” information that remains hidden from us.

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