Against BibliOblivion: How modern scribes digitized an old book. Manuela Delfino

Against BibliOblivion: How modern scribes digitized an old book
Manuela Delfino*
Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ITD-CNR), Via de Marini 6, 16149 Genova, Italy
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 4 March 2011
Received in revised form
25 May 2011
Accepted 26 May 2011
Keywords:
Digital literacy
Digitization
Secondary education
Case-study
a b s t r a c t
In investigating how to best support the learning of digital competences at school, it is paramount to take
into account the concrete reality (cultural, technological, and institutional) that teachers face in their
daily struggle to prepare students for the information society. Hence case studies are needed to inform us
on the complex relationship between educational aims, technological tools and contextual features in
fostering digital literacy. This contribution describes a project ran in a class of an Italian lower secondary
school during a course on digital literacy. The project, realized in collaboration with the local children’s
library, consisted in the digitization of a text written in late XIX century. The results highlight various
educational outcome of the activity. These include both technological progresses, such as improvement
of students’ digital competences and refinement of their skills in the use of a word processor, but also
cultural and civic benefits, related to opportunities for reflection on the evolution of language and
culture, and the sharing of the final product with a large community. The roots of this success are
analyzed, in order to suggest general criteria for using digitization activities as an effective method in
digital literacy education.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“But as I glanced absently at the pages passing before my eyes, I was really observing the monks.
I was struck by their calm, their serenity. [.] Here, I said to myself, is the greatness of our order: for centuries and centuries men like
these have seen the barbarian hordes burst in, sack their abbeys, plunge kingdoms into chasms of fire, and yet they have gone on
cherishing parchments and inks, have continued to read, moving their lips over words that have been handed down through centuries
and which they will hand down to the centuries to come. They went on reading and copying as the millennium approached; why should
they not continue to do so now?” (Umberto Eco, 1983: p. 183)
1. Introduction
Digital literacy is considered a key competence in our society, related both to a plurality of technical skills needed to use digital devices
and to a variety of cognitive, psychological, emotional and sociological skills needed to use effectively the same devices (Buckingham, 2003,
2006, 2007; Commission of the European Communities, 2005; Eshet-Alkalai, 2004; Eshet-Alkalai & Amichai-Hamburger, 2004; Gilster,
1997; Hartley, 2009; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Leahy & Dolan, 2010; Rivoltella, 2008). Despite this emphasis, there is a gap between
research, policy and practice in education on digital literacy.
Many questions are still open: Which aspects of digital literacy should be acquired at school, and which others should be left to develop
independently from formal schooling? What are the methods and practices that best support the learning of digital competences? What can
teachers do with their students, given all the contextual constraints they face every day (e.g., low students/computers ratio, heterogeneity in
the students’ competences and equipment, exclusion of digital literacy from the curriculum), to best prepare them for living in the infor-
mation society?
This paper originated at the conclusion of an educational experience ran in a lower secondary Italian school within a course on Digital
literacy, finalized at the digitization of a book written and published in the last decade of the XIX century.
* Tel.: þ39 010 6475349; fax: þ39 010 6475300.
E-mail address: delfino@itd.cnr.it.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Computers & Education
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
0360-1315/$ – see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.05.018
Computers & Education 57 (2011) 2145–2155

The contribution may be read as a worked example to the area of digital media and learning (Gee, 2010), an answer to the need felt by
scholars to share their practices and methods of dealing with specific education problems within a relatively new field of knowledge. The
experience mixes up digital literacy with social practices that involve people and institutions in flesh and blood: its rationale is to fight
against the digital divide, to avoid the inequalities that emerge from differential access to and use of the Web and create the technical and
social presuppositions for meaningful participation (Hargittai, 2003; Warschauer, 2003).
1.1. Digitizing a book
The dream to make bound books available in a digital format to readers all around the world is quite an old one, testified by many of the
digitization initiatives implemented worldwide (Gutenberg Project, Google Books, Carnegie Mellon Million Book Project, the European
Digital Library Project, Europeana, to name a few). These initiatives involve volunteers, agencies, public and private institutions (Hart, 1992;
Lebert, 2008), all of which would benefit from the development of better tools and the improvement in existing technologies and techniques
(Sankar, Ambati, Pratha, & Jawahar, 2006).
According to the purposes underlying most digitization projects, Coyle (2006a) identifies digitization for preservation, for discovery, for
delivery, for reading, for research, for machine manipulation: all initiatives that take place mostly among the so called memory institutions
(e.g., libraries, archives, museums).
Other authors emphasize the educational implications of digitizing the cultural heritage by the institutions in charge of higher education
(Dahlström & Doracic, 2009; Manzuch, Huvila, & Aparac-Jelusic, 2005; Perry, 2005) and place such experiences within the field of library
and information science (Coyle, 2006b; Dougherty, 2010; Kajberg & Lørring, 2005).
The methods used are strictly connected to the purposes of digitization, as well as to the technologies, the resources (related to people
and their competences, to the time at disposal, to the financial support) and the contexts in which digitization takes place (e.g., a corpo-
ration, a library, a school).
Digitizing a book requires making its content digital, but this can mean two different things, involving different technologies and
practices. On the one hand, it can mean making a digital photograph of the book and its components (and in this case, the better the photo,
the better the idea that we can get of the initial object); on the other, it can mean ensuring that its contents are readable - and therefore
usable - by a computer (e.g., search the text, easily make new editions, have the chance to copy and paste selected parts, so that speech
programs may convert the text into spoken words). In the first case, a scanner machine is enough to digitize a book. In the second case, both
a scanner and a software for optical characters recognition (OCR) are needed or, as an alternative, this can be done by type-writing the text,
copying it by hands on the computer. And it is in this latter sense that the term digitization will be used henceforth.
2. Method
The present contribution is a descriptive case-study. The considerations presented here derive from direct observations conducted
during the project development as well as from the analysis of the questionnaire compiled by the students at the end of the activity.
The author of the paper is both an academic researcher and a secondary school teacher. In particular, she was the teacher of the course on
Digital literacy described here, and this allowed her to have an internal perspective on this educational experience.
3. Overview of the project
“Against BibliOblivion: saving a book from oblivion” is a project designed and conducted during the school year 2008/2009, in the Italian
lower secondary school “D’Oria-Pascoli” in collaboration with the international children’s library “Edmondo De Amicis”, both placed in
Genoa.
As mentioned, the project consisted in the digitization of an old book by a lower secondary school class. The activity was carried out in
the second half of the year, within the annual course on Digital literacy, run 1 h a week in the computer lab. For reasons related to the
number of computers at disposal and to the classroom dimension, the students had to be split in two groups, so that each student could go to
the lab for an hour every two weeks.
3.1. Participants
The participants were 21 students (11 males and 10 females) of a 6th grade class, which is the first year of lower secondary school in Italy,
from families belonging to the upper-middle class. 3 of the students were Spanish native speakers at their third year of school in Italy.
18 out of 21 students had a computer at home and 16 of them had an Internet connection. As we will see, despite their technological
equipment, students were not competent and autonomous users of digital technologies.
3.2. Project background
The general aim of the course was to improve the students’ digital competences and the specific objective was to refine their skills in the
use of a word processor. This was pursued in two stages.
Initially, in the first half of the year, the students – who came from different local primary schools – were asked to carry out simple tasks
(e.g., start and quit a computer, access and create files and folders; rename them; manipulate windows; edit a text file) aimed at aligning the
skills they already possessed, making them feel at ease in the computer lab, sharing a common computer-related vocabulary, analyzing and
describing their difficulties in using computers and in defining and performing some basic operative procedures. Unfortunately, given that
lessons were scattered in time and of short duration, it became clear that traditional exercises were not adequate to improve either the
students skills or their familiarity with the tools used: students did not appear to be well motivated and the same procedures had often to be
M. Delfino / Computers & Education 57 (2011) 2145–21552146

demonstrated over and over from one lesson to another, indicating that traditional exercises had little grip on attention, interest and
motivation.
However, the positive aspect of this phase was the fact that individual differences and uncertainties in using computers and approaching
technologies emerged, thus enabling the teacher to create individual competence profiles for each student. As we will see, these profiles
were useful in the monitoring and evaluation phases of the project.
3.3. Objectives
To overcome the problems just mentioned, the second half of the year entailed the development of a project on a larger scale, in which
each student was asked to complete his/her own task, thus consolidating specific procedures, and to cooperate with peers in pursuing
a common goal. The rationale was to present students with a specific, clear and concrete aim, easily identifiable and understandable by
everyone, without the need to re-introduce the task from time to time. In addition, using an activity that was meaningful also outside the
school setting (the digitized book was later on to be offered to a public library) was supposed to provide a much stronger motivation for
students to engage with the task, as opposed to the self-referential nature of the traditional exercises carried out during the first half of the
course.
According to the institutional goals of the course, at the end of the school year each student should have become more competent and
fluent in typing with the keyboard and in using the main editing functions of word processors (e.g., how to insert bold and italics, how to
justify the text), as well as more familiar with the technical terms in the field of text writing (e.g., paragraph, spacing, indentation, heading).
It was then opted for the digital transcription of a text, with the intent to be faithful to the original, since this relatively simple activity
seemed to meet all the needs identified by the teacher.
We will see in the following sections how the activity was designed and conducted.
3.4. Phases
“One day our teacher entered the classroom and asked us whether we would like to save an ancient book, by rewriting it on a computer.
We, excited, accepted and, lesson after lesson, we managed to do it. It was tough, but then the result compensates for the effort”.1
This is the
synthesis of the project according to a student.
The activity required 15 h of class, within the space of four months.
The work was organized into different phases: the choice of the volume to be copied and the negotiation of an agreement with the
librarians; the introduction of the project to the pupils; the volume digitization; the proofreading; the formatting and assembling of the
digital version; the delivery of the completed work; the reflection on process and outcomes. At the end of the project the students were
asked to fill a questionnaire designed to make them reflect on the activity.
In what follows, some of the educational and organizational characteristics that make the project worth to be replied in other contexts
are presented, enriched by the considerations expressed by the students in their questionnaire.
3.5. Tools chosen
The tools chosen for the digitization were two: a wiki and a traditional word processor.
A wiki is an online collaborative software that allows a set of users to edit and update its interlinked pages. In addition to this, the
majority of wikis have a chronology and track every single change made to the pages, thus allowing both to monitor the stratification of the
editing and to restore a previous version of the documents.
The wiki used for the project “Against BibliOblivion” was Pbworks, a U.S. software, which forced the students to work in an English
language interface environment (http://digitalizziamo.pbworks.com/). This tool was ideal for our purposes because it is free (if used for
teaching purposes), intuitive and easy to access and use. It allowed access to authorized users only: each student was given a login and
password and could work in a secure environment and monitor the contribution made by those who accessed the system.
The choice of a wiki ensured a high degree of flexibility in the organization of the working time and guaranteed a unique repository
accessible from anywhere by each participant. This avoided the dispersion of multiple files spread over different computers and therefore
the risk of loss or duplication of old and new versions of files.
The structure of the online environment was isomorphic to that of the volume to be copied. In other words, the wiki was composed of
several pages, as many as the chapters of the printed book, and both had the same title (Fig. 1). The pages in the wiki were organized in
folders, according to the type of work that needed to be done (e.g., Chapters being copied; Chapters revised). This choice allowed students to
proceed in parallel with the work, without interfering with each other.
The second tool was a word processing software (in our case, OpenOffice Writer): when the book was copied and proofread, the wiki
pages were transferred and assembled into a single file on the word processor. In the transition from an English interface environment to an
Italian interface the spell checking instruments became active. We will see in the following section that this large amount of “red lines” was
very useful for educational reasons.
Finally, the document was saved in several formats (.Txt, .Rtf, .Doc, .Pdf) and transferred on a CD-Rom, together with the non-OCR
scanned version of the book. On their own initiative, some of the students made the cover of the CD, by digitally rearranging some
images scanned from the old book.
1
“Un giorno la nostra prof entrando in classe ci chiese se ci sarebbe piaciuto salvare un libro di antica data riscrivendolo tutto al computer. Noi, entusiasti, accettammo e
lezione dopo lezione siamo riusciti a farcela. È stata dura ma poi il risultato compensa la fatica” (the translation from Italian is mine).
M. Delfino / Computers & Education 57 (2011) 2145–2155 2147

4. The project step by step
4.1. Selecting the volume to be copied
There are several aspects that teachers should take into consideration when they want to make their students digitize a book and
share it:
- legal restrictions, namely compliance with copyright laws: to sanction online publication, the book must belong to the public domain
(i.e., it has to be free from copyright) or its copyright needs to be already expired (in Italy this happens 70 years after the death of the
author or of the translator of the book);
- utility constraints, related to absence of high quality electronic versions of the same volume, which would make further digitization
unnecessary (if in doubt about these constraints, consider that many digitization initiatives provide lists of the volumes undergoing
such copying processes);
- material constraints, concerning the physical conditions of the volume to be copied: the paper book must be in good physical condition
both to get it out from the library and to make a photocopy of it (the copies are needed to split the work among the students);
- educational opportunities connected with the book contents and the language used by its author: even though contents do not have to
be strictly related to curricular disciplines, it is better to find a text that is able to stimulate the students’ interests and worthy of
discussion in the class context;
- contextual constraints and cultural potentials, related to the students: for example, the presence of recent migration students from
diverse languages and cultures should be taken into account in order to break down cultural and language barriers and prevent
excessive frustration (e.g., ancient books written in an old-fashioned and obscure language should be avoided in a multicultural class
composed by recent-immigration students);
- logistical constraints, related both to the number of students and to the length of the text. If too long, the volume could be difficult to
digitize within the fixed terms and thus the experience could be needlessly frustrating for students; if too short, the activity could be
interpreted as trivial and thus missing its learning goals;
- aspects related to the volume structure and to its literary genre: if digitization aspires to go beyond type-writing, it is then preferable to
choose a book that can be split in short parts of independent value, so that each can be understood and appreciated by its copyist (e.g.,
a collection of short novels or a group of poems are to be preferred to a long romance).
This list could be enriched and the importance of its items might vary according to what role digitization has to play within the activity
according to the teacher, who is in charge of recognizing an appropriate match between a learners’ ability and the challenges presented by
the task at hand.
In the project presented here, after browsing the library’s OPAC, the librarians were asked for permission to borrow and photocopy two
books from the “Rare and valuable books” section. These volumes met the requirements listed above and were thus selected as candidates
Fig. 1. Snapshot of the wiki page where students copied chapter 23 of the book (for privacy reasons, the name of the student was deleted).

for digitization: a book telling the story of the life and times of Christopher Columbus (Baccini, 1915) and a book of advice and etiquette
intended for young people (Staurenghi Consiglio, 1897).
4.2. Involving the students
Although designed by the teacher, the project was presented to students as an authentic task, a work commissioned by the head of the
city library, which the class could either agree or refuse to perform. This was done to give the students a chance to reject the proposal or, on
the contrary, to freely join the initiative, thus reinforcing their commitment. On one hand, given the limited success of the laboratory lessons
so far, a change in teaching strategies was deemed necessary. On the other hand, since the activity would have been onerous in terms of time
and responsibility, it was important that students did not perceive it as one of the many educational activities imposed by the teacher.
Actually, the situation was new for them: in contrast to what typically happens at school, students really had the chance to refuse to
participate in the project. Moreover, they were given the chance of choosing which book to digitize, between the two alternatives selected
by the teacher: the opportunity to make a decision on this crucial aspect of the project further strengthened the sense of participation and
responsibility of the students.
Thus the activity was designed as a democratic learning experience, in which participants - in the respect of their different roles and
competences - worked together toward a common goal, and students were provided awareness and engagement: for all these aspects the
activity can be ascribed to the upcoming area of crowdsourcing (Howe, 2006), where the target audience is students and the motivation
factor is education.
During the presentation of the project the teacher emphasized its main difficulties: the rigor and precision needed to ensure the quality
of the final product (an electronic copy adherent to the original one), the risk of getting bored with a job at times repetitive, the time
constraints (the work should have been completed by the end of the school year). All these warnings contributed to create an expectation in
students and to make them eager to perform the task: the risk taken by the teacher – to design a completely new activity – was compensated
by the enthusiasm with which the students accepted the challenge and chose the book to be copied.
The choice of the students fell on the text written by Virginia Staurenghi Consiglio, which was by far the longest of the two volumes (127
pages, against 47 of the booklet by Ida Baccini): although it contained edifying tales to teach good manners, it was perceived by the students
as more curious and original, thus much more interesting than the story of a historical character.
Before making their choice, students could touch both books, browse them, read pages at random, and in general try to collect clues to
help them choose: e.g., not only the number of pages to be copied, but also the size of the fonts; not just the general topic of the text, but
specific statements that could be helpful in understanding the language used by the author.
4.3. Typing: how contemporary scribes organize their work
The process of digitization was preceded by a debate on how to organize the activity (e.g., whether it was better to copy alone, or in pairs)
and how to create optimal working conditions. Across the whole activity students remained free to organize their own work as they
preferred, but the initial shared reflection helped them to select an effective strategy to perform the task, and to consider both pros and cons
of it.
At the beginning the shortest chapters of the book were distributed among students, just to give an idea on how to proceed and to test
the wiki chosen. Once left free to organize their work, all students could appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of different group
composition, as opposed to working alone. They experienced that working in pairs, with one dictating the text and the other typing it,
allowed them to keep the flow of writing and have greater control of the text copied (e.g., the risk of jumping the lines was reduced), but
they also realized that working on their own was less distracting because they had no one to talk to. Furthermore, while working together
made it easier to comment the contents and share observations on linguistic peculiarities, working alone increased the chances of getting
caught by the reading and forget the activity.
As soon as they started typing the text, the students formulated very specific questions and gave different answers according to their
personal experience: Is it better to work in real light or artificial light? The humanities teacher generally says that, when writing essays,
frequent pauses to emend typos make the contents less readable because the flow keeps getting broken, but is this true also when copying
a text already written? What is the best way to visualize the screen? Is there an optimal zoom setting? Is there a best way to display the text
on screen (i.e., magnifying a small portion of the text vs. having a uniform overview)?
The answers to all these questions varied a lot. Students were free to experiment different ways of working in order to autonomously find
the appropriate solutions to their problems. Some students elected to work at home on their assignments, even if they were not required to
do so, in order to finish in time.
4.4. Copying and proofreading: students as textual critics
The task assigned to students was to copy the text using the digital tools chosen by the teacher. They had to be careful in respecting some
textual features (i.e., paragraph structure; punctuation; words written in italics or bold), without attempting to replicate other graphic
conventions of the book (e.g., font type; spacing before punctuation marks, actually no longer used in Italian books; indentation in the first
line of each paragraph) (Fig. 2).
Having to faithfully copy each word, students could realize how a language apparently so similar to their own has changed over a century,
and how these changes were evident in spelling, syntax and grammar.
Even though Italian spelling is mostly phonemic and thus usually difficult to mistake, still some changes occurred over the last century. It
was mainly when students started using an Italian spell checker (in the migration from the wiki with an English interface to a traditional
word processor with an Italian interface and vocabulary) that they realized how much caution was needed to decide whether it was the case
to accept or not the computer suggestions on spelling. Nothing could be taken for granted: sometimes the spell checker reported as
misspelled words that faithfully reproduced the original text, simply because the spelling of those words had evolved during the last

decades. Of course also genuine typos were detected, but even these cases were still problematic, because often the typo was already
present in the original volume and had been correctly transcribed by incredulous students. This raised a philological conundrum for the
students (one that textual critics in academia are still debating, by the way), and it did so very naturally, as a side effect of applying
a computerized spell checker with a contemporary Italian dictionary to a digitized text written in late XIX century Italian with its own
editorial flaws. The students faced (and enjoyed) the same practical dilemmas that plague professional philologists in the digital era: What
has to be done in these cases? Should a contemporary scribe copy the typing errors or are they allowed to correct them? What is, if any, the
best text-editing technique and method?
During the proofreading phase, each digitized chapter was assigned to two students who had not typed that chapter and they had to re-
read and correct the text copied, independently from each other. In the end, all chapters were proofread twice by the students and once by
the teacher. They all had to compare the original pages with the text typed by their peers and find out inaccuracies, omissions and typos.
They made their corrections first on paper, then on the digital file (Fig. 3).
In few cases, and only after group discussion, students were allowed by the teacher to make emendations in places where the original
text appeared unequivocally wrong (e.g., digitizing “questo” instead of “quetso”).
4.5. Reading: students as anthropologists
During the copying and the proofreading phases students could appreciate the book contents, also because they were forced to read it with
a pace much slower then what they are used to. Since they were assigned one chapter at a time, they tended to get an in-depth insight of the
meaning of that particular text, often being surprised by the oddness of some ideas. The students, genuinely curious, talked about the
eccentricity of some episodes. Among these, it is worth to cite three pieces that amazed and amused them and thus spurred a lively group
discussion in class. These episodes are also helpful to appreciate the tone and to invite reflection on the themes of the book: as we shall see, even
the quirks of an old-fashioned etiquette can prompt interesting considerations on burning societal issues that are still relevant nowadays.
The first excerpt regards the rules of side-walk etiquette. “Mum is on the left, her daughter is on her right; by what right? With the right
given by the ignorance of one’s duties. The right is due to. but who among you doesn’t know the answer? The right side should be left to
the mother. Only when walking with her father, the young lady is allowed to accept the right side from him”.2
The second passage is a quotation about how inopportune is to tell other people about one’s own dreams. Just a few years before the
publication of Freud’s “The Interpretation of dreams” (19003
), the author of our book wrote: “Among the largest incivility, it must be
Fig. 2. The scanned text (above) and the same text typed by the students (below).
2
“La mamma è sulla sinistra, la fanciulla tiene la destra; con quale diritto? Col diritto dell’ignoranza dei propri doveri. La destra spetta. ma chi di voi non lo sa? La destra
spetta sempre alla mamma. Solo quando una giovanetta va col babbo, può accettare da lui la destra.” (Staurenghi Consiglio, 1897: p. 51; the translation from Italian is mine).
3
Printed in November 1899, but post-dated as 1900 by the publisher.

included the habit, the mania that some youngsters have to tell their dreams. What are dreams? Involuntary, weird visions of things and
facts very strange, often impossible, that occur us during sleep. Who cares about the narration of unlikely oddities?”.4
Finally, the third passage is from the conclusive chapter of the book, in which the author (actually an authoress) stresses her views on the
role of women in society: “What about us? – asks me a lively girl who followed my writing, - us, what duties and rights do we have? As girls,
Fig. 3. The proofreading.
4
“Tra le più grandi inciviltà devesi annoverare l’abitudine, la mania che hanno taluni fanciulli di narrare i loro sogni. / Che cosa sono i sogni? Visioni involontarie, strane, di
cose e fatti stranissimi, spesso impossibili che ci si presentano durante il sonno. A chi volete che interessi la narrazione di stranezze inverosimili?” (Staurenghi Consiglio, 1897:
p. 92; the translation from Italian is mine).

of course we will never become counselors, or deputies, or jurors, or ministers - / Political rights apart that do not concern us, all the other
rights and responsibilities are common to men and women; but women cannot exercise some rights, without being subject to the authority
of their husbands. / We have then, as women, a special mission to perform among the domestic walls; it is the small but very important
mission to educate citizens who will give pride and honour to their Homeland”.5
In other words, the wife’s role should be restricted to the
orderliness of the household, a vision much closer to those expressed by the humanists of the modern age (see, for instance, the writings “On
the family” by Leon Battista Alberti) than to the first waves of feminism beyond the Alps.
4.6. Delivering results: reaping the rewards of one’s efforts
In the final phase the students had the chance to officially hand over their work to the community. After a visit to the headquarters of the
library “De Amicis”, they gave the Cd-Rom containing the digitized book to both the director of the library and the school headmaster. This
constituted an official occasion, involving public figures that generally do not interact directly with students.
Shifting the focus outside the classroom helped students to tackle the project as a real job experience and to present their work to people
other than the teacher. This contributed to break the rigidity of the classic teaching situation, and ensure that everyone – students and
teacher – were “on the same side”, sharing a common purpose and sense of responsibility.
4.7. Reflecting on the process and its outcomes
Reflecting on the project was part of the learning process in all its phases, and had an impact on how students organized their work. As
mentioned, most students revised in itinere their copying strategies (e.g., who initially had opted for individual work then chose to
experiment collaboration, and vice-versa).
Reflection was initially encouraged and scaffolded by the teacher, who prepared grids with a summary of chapters copied/to be copied/to
be revised. Her role progressively faded, as the students increased their autonomy and learned to check the progress of their own work and
to develop tools for monitoring the progress of the activity as a whole.
At the end of the activity, some time was devoted to a retrospective reflection by means of a mainly qualitative questionnaire, designed to
critically think on the path carried out and to let emerge the knowledge acquired (Table 1).
16 out of 21 students (76.19%) filled in the questionnaire. The answers given at this stage revealed a general awareness of the work carried
out. All respondents recognized (a) the presentation of the project, (b) the copying and (c) the proofreading as different phases of the project.
Some of them were more detailed in their description and indicated also other phases as separate steps: the proposal of the activity (3
students out of 16, 18.75%), the choice among two books (6 out of 16, 37.50%), the migration from one digital tool to another (4 students out
of 16, 25%), and the delivery of the digitized book to the librarian (9 students out of 16, 56.25%).
The main difficulties reported by the students regarded the proofreading phase, because it required a very high level of concentration. 4
students wrote that they would have organized differently the proofreading phase: they would have asked to those students who copied the
chapters also to proofread them, while the teacher assigned the proofreading to students different from those who had copied those
particular chapters.
Almost half of the respondents declared that the project increased their familiarity with the keyboard and improved their fluency in
typewriting. 8 students wrote that they discovered what a wiki is and how it works. Others focused on cultural issues: being in touch with
a book written more than a century ago, finding out differences in the Italian language of past decades, etc.
In pretending to write a message addressed to the librarian, students expressed their pride for having been involved in such a project,
which they would recommend to other classes.
Table 1
The final questionnaire.
Against BibliOblivion: a questionnaire to reflect on the work done
Full Name: _________________________________________________
Now that we are at the end of this digitization effort, please answer the following questions, aimed at reflecting on what has been done.
1) A student from another class is quite curios about the digitization project. What would you
tell him/her? Explain him/her the steps of the project, the tools used, etc.
2) Have you met any difficulty during the project? If so, which one? Are there phases that you would
have organized in a different way?
3) Have you learned anything? In case, what?
4) Next week we’ll bring the digitized book to the librarian. Would you like to tell him anything about
the work he proposed us? Would you give him any advice for future projects?
5) Can you remember any part of the book digitized (e.g., anecdotes, characters, situations)? If so,
which one? Briefly summarize them
6) In summary, from 1 (¼low) to 5 (¼high), how much did you like this activity?
7) What are the three things you liked most? What are the three you liked least?
5
“E noi? – mi chiede una vivace fanciulla che ha tenuto dietro al mio scritto, - noi, che doveri e che diritti abbiamo? Noi fanciulle non diventeremo certo né consiglieri, né
deputati, né giurati, né ministri – / Meno i diritti politici, che non ci riguardano, tutti gli altri diritti e doveri sono comuni all’uomo e alla donna; però la donna non può
esercitare alcuni diritti, senza essere sottoposta all’autorità maritale. / Abbiamo poi, noi donne, una missione speciale da compiere tra le domestiche pareti; missione modesta
ma importantissima, quella di educare cittadini, che siano onore e vanto della Patria.” (Staurenghi Consiglio, 1897: p. 123; the translation from Italian is mine).

As for recalling anecdotes, characters, and situations from the digitized book, 8 students cited portion of the text, 4 of them declared their
inability to remember anything, the other 4 attributes their weak memory of the text copied to the need to concentrate and focus on
copying/proofreading tasks. In any case, the most frequent cited items are the main characters of the book, and the most quoted episodes are
those that were discussed in the collaborative stages of the activity.
Students expressed strong satisfaction towards the experience, attributing it an average vote of 3.81 (St. Dev. 0.54) on a scale from 1 (low
satisfaction) to 5 (high satisfaction). No one expressed votes inferior to 3.
Coherently with their previous answers, among the things they liked most were the online wiki environment, which was felt as a novelty
and a serious tool “for grown-ups” and not just for children; the book itself, for its peculiar contents and its strange Italian language; the idea
of helping a library in achieving a goal. On the opposite, what they disliked most were the attention and patience required by the proof-
reading activity.
In the answers to the questionnaire many students expressed, even if it was not required, their happiness for having been asked to
adhere to the project. A student, in particular, wrote “In my view the best thing the teacher did was asking us if we really wanted to do that
work”.6
4.8. Assessing and evaluating students
The final assessment was made on the basis of the commitment shown during the different phases of the project and on the individual
progress made in performing the basic tasks identified at the beginning of the academic year.
In assessing students’ commitment to the activity, the teacher took into account the work effectively done by the students (e.g., the
chapters copied and/or proofread), the level of participation shown (e.g., collaborative behavior, suggestions about how to proceed), their
sense of responsibility and motivation in completing their work (e.g., remembering their password to access the online environment,
having their paper chapters with them), the quality of the final product (each chapter was compared to the printed volume by the teacher),
their use and comprehension of the technical vocabulary and nomenclature concerning both the text and the software used for digitizing it
(e.g., paragraphs, bold characters, saving files, opening folders, accessing an online environment). Even though the wiki allowed the
teacher to track and analyze the contribution made by the participants who accessed the environment, this information could not be taken
at face value, since many students worked in pairs and thus only the name of the one who logged to the wiki was traced. More generally, in
principle nothing prevented students from sharing their login information with others (most notably their parents), so it cannot be
excluded that someone else accessed the system from home under the alias of a certain student. Nevertheless, the number of wiki accesses
outside of the school lab (14 of 128 total accesses, 10.94%) testifies of the students’ interest for the activity. Moreover, such enthusiasm was
widespread among them, since 9 out of 21 students accessed the system from home, even though this was not strictly required by the
teacher.
In order to evaluate the individual progress at the end of the year, the individual profiles obtained during the first half of the year became
very useful. They allowed to monitor each student according to their individual initial skills, thus considering different variables in assessing
progress: if in the early stages of the project a student was not able to edit a bold character, at the end the teacher examined this specific
skill; if a student had problems in using the keyboard, the teacher verified his/her typing fluency; and so on.
To prevent discrimination against those who did not have a computer connected at home, or in favor of those with over-zealous parents
who might help their children completing the assignment, it was decided not to give too much weight to the work done from home.
5. Conclusions
The computer skills demonstrated by these students both at the onset of the course and during the digitization activity give reason to
question the “digital native” stereotype, according to which people who grown up with technology are thereby native speakers of the digital
language (Howe & Strauss, 2000, 2003; Prensky, 2001). Despite the fact that personal computers (not to mention cell phones and other
portable digital devices) were highly diffused among both the students and their parents (Delfino & Persico, in print), the skills shown at the
beginning of the year were not uniform, and the average level of technological expertise was far from what proponents of the digital native
idea would predict. Hence this experience contributes to a growing body of critics against any simplified usage of the “digital native”
metaphor (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008; Bayne & Ross, 2007; Jenkins, 2007; Sandford, 2006; Stoerger, 2009), inasmuch as it points to the
relevance of mediating factors such as background culture, schooling, and context of use of a given technology.
According to the results of the activity described in this paper, it seems that digitizing a book without using a scanner can be a very useful
activity, the meaning of which is not reduced to the chance of making a printed text available in digital format: in educational contexts, the
consequences can be much more diversified and far-reaching. Digitizing a book is not only useful to effectively pursue objectives connected
to digital literacy (in our case, the need to improve students’ digital competences and to refine their skills in the use of a word processor). As
witnessed by the experience reported here, digitizing also offers opportunities to reflect on the evolution of language and culture, and to
share with a large community the book’s contents. And it provided a natural way to get acquainted to different tools and methods for
collaborative networked writing, without making technology the unique and final objective of the activity.
In terms of curricular goals, the project “Against BibliOblivion” reached its initial objective. The students became more fluent in typing
with the keyboard, made practice and became quite autonomous in the use of a word processor, were able to master and explain different
procedures, and acquired greater precision in using the technical terms in the field of text writing.
In addition, the digitization of the text had various positive side effects (some quite unexpected, honestly), which contribute to make the
experience worth adapting for replication in different contexts, with all the necessary adjustments (age of pupils, types of school, tools at
disposal, objectives to be reached, etc.). Even though the final product was a digital book, the students had the chance to handle an old book
and to analyze the signs of aging: the yellowed pages, the worn cover, the binding starting to separate from the spine of the book, the
6
“Secondo me la cosa migliore che la professoressa ha fatto è stato chiederci se quel lavoro lo volevamo fare davvero” (the translation from Italian is mine).

invisible dust on the cover, the smell and texture of each page. These elements increased in the students a sense of responsibility for the care
and preservation of the book as an object, as well as emphasizing their active role as mediators between a text difficult to access and the
community of readers.
A further element of great importance was the reflection on the role of libraries in our world, their services and the staff who work there.
This is the main reason for choosing a real library close to the school, rather than adhering – as it would seem more practical – to one of the
national/international digitization projects ran by volunteers and quite often involving schools (e.g., Gutenberg project, LiberLiber). Famil-
iarity with local libraries cannot be taken for granted for students enrolled in lower secondary school. In our case, for some students this was
the first direct experience with a public library and they appreciated the multiplicity of functions covered by it: conservation, loan, cataloging,
promotion of collections, etc. Accustomed to being treated as potential customers and consumers-to-be, some students were surprised to find
out that there are places in which books and movies are provided free of charge, in which the card to enter the library does not entitle you to
discounts, where everyone is welcome and encouraged to remain throughout the opening hours without being required to buy anything. This
has obvious repercussions on civic education, going well beyond the teaching of abstract rules of conduct within the classroom.
Finally, a key factor in ensuring the success of the activity was using the most appropriate technological solution for the needs of the
educational activities, given all the contextual constraints (number of students, availability of computers, limited time, etc.). In this case, the
use of scanners and OCR software would have limited the familiarization of students with word processors, which was the stated objective
of the course, but also reduced the fringe benefits described above.
The approach chosen for the experience here described had a meaning for the context in which the activity was situated. But in other
contexts a teacher could benefit from different choices and the activity – still under the heading of “literacy and technology” – would present
some of the same challenges and opportunities. For example, with older students, already proficient with the keyboard, a teacher might use
a scanner and an OCR to digitize the text, thus skipping the dictation/writing activity, and focus instead on proofreading and annotating the
text; with the aim to boost the work done from home, the students, as well as their teacher, might use the variety of tools at disposal within
the platform (e.g., forum areas to comment their work or to “raise a flag” when in doubt with the transcription; documents repository
collecting tutorials, FAQs, etc.); with a major amount of time and to keep the children entertained as well as add to their learning, the book
contents might be recalled through simple quizzes and other questions.
Similarly, the type and genre of the digitized book could and should be adapted to the educational aims of the activity: in this case, the
emphasis was on digital competences and collaborative skills, so the contents of the book needed not to be continuous with the curriculum;
but, if digitization is framed within a disciplinary course, it would be good to select books that cater to the knowledge levels of the students
and also enhance their existing education, such as history books and children books.
Whatever the exact context, copying a text requires awareness, attention, precision and patience for ensuring accuracy (Chandler-Olcott,
2009). All these virtues have enormous educational value, especially in connection with the use of technology: as this experience suggests,
the commonplace assumption that the digital age necessary requires or even imposes a “fast-food approach” to technology is deeply
mistaken. On the contrary, depending on the task at hand, the appropriate technological tools can actually facilitate accuracy, critical
reflection and a slow-paced approach to the subject matter, trying to avoid the alleged risk of shallowness associated with using computers
(Carr, 2010; Greenfield, 2009). It all depends on selecting the right task for the right technology – and not only the other way around. In this
respect, digitizing an old text can be very valuable for students who, as modern scribes, will discover that a book is a wonderful thing not
only to read, but also to copy.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Paola Pongiglione and Francesco Langella, for having trusted me and for the welcoming atmosphere of their school and
library. And to Fabio Paglieri love and gratitude, for endless support and for careful reading and comments.
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