Digitization

Although analog data is generally more stable, digital data has the potential to be more easily shared and accessed and, if moved to new static formats as needed, can theoretically be propagated indefinitely without loss. This potential has led to the rapid development of organizational digitization projects aimed at improving access and digital protection.

Digitization and digital preservation are sometimes mistaken for the same thing, although they are different, although digitization is a very important first step in digital care. Libraries, archives, museums, and other memory organizations digitize objects to preserve fragile materials and create more access points for patrons.

Doing so creates challenges for information professionals and the solutions are as diverse as the agencies that implement them. Some analog materials, such as audio and videotape, are nearing the end of their life cycle, so it is important to digitize them before making them obsolete and making media decay data irreversible..

Process

The term digitization is often used when different types of information, such as objects, text, sounds, images, or speech, are converted into a single binary code. At the heart of the process is the compromise between the capture device and the playback device, which represents the result as reliably as possible to the original source, and the purpose of digitization lies in the speed and accuracy of this type of information. Transmitted compared to analog information.

Numeric information is one of two numbers, 0 or 1. These numbers are called bits (abbreviations for binary digits), and the arrays of 0s and 1s that make up information are called bytes.

Both the number of possible values ​​of the signal at a given time for an analog signal and the number of midpoints of the signal at a given time interval is constantly changing. However, digital signals are distinct in two respects – usually a finite range of integers – so in practice, digitization is only an approximation of the signal it represents.

Digitization occurs in two parts:

Discretization

Simulate the reading of signal A and sample the signal value at that time (frequency). Each such reading is called a sample and can be considered to have infinite accuracy at this stage;

Quantization

Modes are rounded to a fixed number (such as an integer), a process called quantization.

Often, these things happen at the same time, but they are conceptually different.