alt Hacker NewsThere are a significant number of digital scans available online. The problem is that they're only a tip of the iceberg of the available material, and digitizing records costs time and money (that apparently they don't have much of right now).
There are a significant number of digital scans available online. The problem is that they're only a tip of the iceberg of the available material, and digitizing records costs time and money (that apparently they don't have much of right now).
The smart move is to downsize the reading rooms and use the money for a high speed scanning team.
The scanning should focus on volume not accuracy or quality. If anyone needed that sort of thing, they could always go back to the original documents.
So many digitisation projects spend half their time perfecting metadata etc - which IMO is of far lower value than just getting the paper scanned and sorting the rest later.