Do you digitize everything?

When it comes to digitizing archival holdings, this is by far the most asked question for a digital archivist. The answer? No! 

Why not? There are two central reasons why archives typically do not adopt a completionist approach to digitizing their holdings.  

The first is practical – it would just take way too much time! Given the scale of this sort of project, it would take years and years to complete. Unless an institution is retaining the services of a specialized digitization firm, the project of digitizing all of an archive’s holdings would very likely take an archivist their entire career to complete. 

Patience is a virtue (when scanning).

ID: 1271_3_59

The second reason an archive typically does not digitize everything that it has is related to added value. While the considerations will differ for every archive in the world, an archivist must ask themself if a digitized version of a particular record adequately conveys its value. For some records, for example, newspaper clippings, it’s likely that the information in the record is conveyed very well to a researcher consulting the record in its digital format. For records like handwritten letters, for example, there is an intangible element – an aura – that is certainly lost when a researcher is only viewing a digital version of it. It is important to bear in mind that for almost all archival material, there is an “objectness,” a very human tactile experience, that will always be lost in a digital representation of an object.  

The tactility of this object, like many others, risks being completely lost on a digital platform.