As a preface to this post (and in some senses, this blog in general), let me say this: I was originally ill-disposed to digital media in a general sense. I think some of it had to do with a stubborn streak regarding media formats. I love books. Not just reading and what it entails, but the format itself. The smell of old books, the feel of an old, well-worn tome. Though digitized content gains much in convenience, as my brushes with it after graduation from the University of Mississippi with my B.A. in English taught me, I still feel there is something of the essence or the character of accessing a digitized work that is fundamentally altered from that of reading it in book format. Perhaps it is simply the unfamiliarity, but there's something that feels less human somehow about accessing digital works, to me. There is no arguing, however, that as the field of information out there continues to grow at increasing rates, that digitization is not needed.
Though necessity may be the mother of invention, she doesn't always provide the best quality of results. And in a sense, that is part of my concern regarding it. Google's mass-digitization efforts provide an extremely efficient method to process works into a digital format but, as Karen Coyle points out here: http://www.kcoyle.net/jal-32-6.html , it apparently offers little in the way of human oversight or correction to the OCR results. Similarly, as opposed to non-mass digitization techniques, the results lack detailed mark-up, beyond the searchable nature of the OCR results.
Put another way, the sheer scale and pace of the undertaking inhibits efforts to truly understand what is being processed. This problem reminds me of some of the background elements from the novel Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett. In it, one of the focal characters heads a archaeological effort in the wake of catastrophic warfare, in the attempts to salvage human knowledge nearly lost to catastrophic warfare which greatly set back the state of human knowledge. The character's work becomes sponsored by a large governmental agency, enabling a rapid processing of the materials, but he finds that he has begun to question the quality of the results. He continues to circle back to the question of "How do we know what we don't know?" even as his organization becomes ever-more prominent. Eventually, he finds his distaste for the unthinking aggregation being carried out has grown to the point that he feels compelled to depart the organization he created.
Mind, I do not think this is especially predictive. The Warhammer 40,000 setting is a dystopia, after all. Still, it's a far more interesting consideration of the process than I'd have expected to appear in a series typically only concerned with the exploits of over-the-top super-soldiers in an absurdly large-scaled science fiction setting.
