“You Should Just Digitize It All”

My colleagues are always sending my memes like this because they know me well

If you are ever to meet a digital archivist someday, and for some reason want to get under their skin, proceed to ask them this one question: “You’re just going to digitize all the books right?” When their eye starts twitching, you’ll know you hit your mark.

It is becoming a tradition of mine as we celebrate American Archives Month to come and shed some light on the many myths surrounding digitization and archives. One of my personal favorite overviews can be read here but I thought for this year, let’s really dig into this idea. Why don’t we digitize it all?

Let’s start with the practical reasons. We don’t have enough time, money, or people. Currently, FSU Special Collections & Archives (SCA) alone holds roughly over 88,000 books and 24,000 linear feet of archival materials. This is SCA only – nothing else in the Libraries or anywhere else in the world is part of that total. Based on our current staffing levels and equipment in the Digital Library Center here, that would take around 100 years to digitize. And that is only digitization. It would take roughly another 70 years to properly describe those materials to make them actually discoverable and searchable online for everyone. And those estimates (and they are very rough estimates making a lot of what I know to be incorrect assumptions) are only if that was all we did, 365 days a year, 8 hours a day. Not to mention, that is only what we hold on our shelves today. We are constantly adding to our holdings on a regular basis.

Once everything is digitized and described though, FSU will then also need to maintain an incredibly large digital library online for the foreseeable future, which will cost a lot of money to maintain and continue to provide quality access to, and will require staff to maintain it over that same indeterminate period of time. You can see how even Google could have been thwarted in their mission to digitize it all with those kinds of numbers for a fairly small collection. FSU SCA is mighty but on the smaller side compared to some of the older, larger institutions in the United States. For example, the Library of Congress holds over 39 million books alone!

All that said, even if we could afford to digitize it all, we still wouldn’t. For a couple of reasons: one, we don’t know enough to meaningfully describe everything we hold to make it discoverable even if we digitized it. This is especially true of our photograph collections. If we describe 20 photographs as “female students studying” because that is literally all we know about them, is that really helpful? Was it worth the time, money, and people to digitize it? To keep it available online year after year? Trust me, archivists wish they could say “yes, absolutely” but we also need to acknowledge that the time taken to work on that set of photographs could have been better used elsewhere. Two, we have to ask if objects are “worth” digitizing, not just due to description limitations but also if the objects would be useful to users. Take my 20 photographs of “female students studying” example. What if those photographs are all of the same 4 students, but the photos were taken at slightly different angles? As a user, do you want to look at what is essentially the same photograph 20 times? No, in fact, that would probably be very annoying and frustrating to you so we make selections when we digitize based on description and usefulness of the materials which is why we’ll never digitize it all. Also, more and more, the digital preservation community is discussing the climate impact of us creating and preserving the amount of digital content the world is constantly creating without some serious limits on our processes (I recommend this read – it’s a fascinating discussion!).

For example, why did we ever digitize two identical photographs?! Legacy issues exist in all digital libraries. We would not do so today.

I feel like this is all depressing news so here’s a happy thought – SCA holds lots of unique materials but we also hold lots of printed materials that other institutions hold as well and they are digitizing too! For any of our book digitization projects, one thing we always check when selecting titles is if the book is already freely available online elsewhere. If it is, we’ll put our efforts towards titles not available instead. That means users can still access those items and we can put our energy towards things not yet available online. Archival collections don’t work as well in this case but books are a great example of how all archives, libraries, and museums can work together to get our collections online and share the work of doing so. During American Archives Month, hundreds of institutions all over the country are sharing their work and it’s a great time celebrate the thousands of digital objects coming online all the time as a result of that work. So while we might not individually ever “digitize it all”, we are always working to bring better access and discoverability to our collections.