If you’d like to elicit the collective groan of archivists everywhere, simply ask aloud “Why don’t archives just digitize everything?” It seems like a simple solution to problems around access and preservation but, in reality, it is anything but. Digitizing special collections can be much more involved than scanning old family photos at home (though that is also a valid form of personal archiving). Materials need to be arranged, described, conserved, digitized, preserved in a digital repository, and attached to a discovery layer designed for patrons to access across the world. Each step requires specialized labor, making the process more time consuming and expensive than one might assume- and that’s not even getting into complicated formats like nitrate film or wax cylinders.
With limited resources, archivists are constantly making decisions around prioritization. These decisions come heavily into play when planning a digital collection. If we can’t be comprehensive in our work, we have to tell a story with our selections and make sure it’s clear how and why our decisions were made. For a collection like Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library (SAEF), selection criteria involved a number of factors including physical condition, frequency of citation in the field, and online availability. Some material was already available online, but in lower visual quality or behind paywalls. Some material required too much repair and conservation to be ready within the timeline. These practical concerns have to be weighed against the intellectual project of building a cohesive collection that has both expected big names and unexpected rare discoveries.
The transformational possibilities of digital access might be a less expected factor in the curation process. For many archivists of a certain tradition there can be no topping the personal experience of coming into a reading room and handling the physical materials. Letters written by Frederick Douglass are meaningful not just for their content, now accessible online, but also for the emotional link to the past that can be experienced when you realize you are holding in your hands the same sheet of paper as one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. On the other hand, special collections reading rooms have rules about handling and security that might restrict your research process in ways digital access completely upends. Those research possibilities are one of the reasons why our selection process led to the digitization of three different editions of David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America.