How difficult is this really?

"This might sound like a condescending question," [WARNING BELLS!] "but how difficult is this really?"

Students, eh? So much arrogance, so little life experience.

The question was asked of me by a student to whom I'm teaching Digitisation. Digitisation is an odd thing to teach. You have to mix theoretical concepts with practical stuff like how to create a .tiff file. And you have to assume no one knows what a .tiff file is. So you get those students who think that what you're teaching them is boring and obvious.

Well, of course it's boring and obvious. Mostly. But what I said in reply was this:

"Yes, it's not difficult. Pushing a button on the scanner is easy. Filing images is easy. The exciting part is knowing you're part of something bigger. Knowing that you're creating a repository that is making the academic output of your institution visible to the world. Sitting down with an academic who has a collection of slides never seen before and knowing that making them available digitally will change the way research in that area will be conducted. Listening to a photographer tell you about the collection of photographs he's donating to your archive, knowing that this is his opportunity for his work to be seen all over the world. A monkey could do the scanning part. But it's not difficult to find the excitement in digitisation."