Digitization by the Numbers

by Terrence J. McDonald, Director

Here are three numbers with which friends of historical archives like the Bentley should be familiar:

0, 1, 0

No, that is not some kind of binary computer code. These are real numbers.

The first zero is the percentage of archival collections that were intentionally created by the Google Books project. That project, as many will recall, was launched in 2002 and set out to try to digitize all the books in the world. With the cooperation of university libraries everywhere—including Michigan’s—millions of volumes were digitized. But archival collections like those at the Bentley were never intended to be part of that project.

The second number, 1, is perhaps unsurprising given the above. It represents the percentage of archival collections in the world that have been digitized. Here at the Bentley, too, that number is less than one percent of our collections.

The third number, yet another 0, is the amount of base budget in most historical archives that was designed to cover the costs of digitization. Like it or not, historical archives are also “historical” organizations. They began before the age of digitization—for the Bentley the beginning was 1935—and they were budgeted for an exclusively paper-based process.

The costs to produce every paper-based collection are significant: a field worker obtains the collection; a processing archivist organizes it; conservationists repair any damage found; reference archivists guide researchers to its important points; and a massive climate-controlled building maintains the paper-based collections in perpetuity.

This is what archives were originally funded to do and what they still must do.

It may be tempting to think that digitized collections would be easier to collect and maintain, but the opposite is true. Digitization requires everything a paper collection does plus the digitization of each page of a collection, optical character recognition that permits searching, and a website on which to display the collection.

These costs are 100 percent above and beyond what is required to obtain and maintain a paper-based collection. And in most archives, budgets have not grown to cover them.

Now let’s look at another “number”: incalculable! That’s the value of some digitized collections.

In the days when there were strictly paper archives of The Michigan Daily— think huge volumes containing paper issues available only in on-campus libraries—about 12 people per month used the historical copies of the newspaper.

By contrast, in the first month that we launched the online, searchable digitized Michigan Daily Digital Archive (digital.bentley.umich.edu/midaily), 6,000 people used it, and that number has risen since.

The existence of this online collection has transformed teaching and research on the campus and made the history of the University much more available to the world.

Two new books on that history have been published in the last year alone: The Boundaries of Pluralism: The World of the University of Michigan’s Jewish Students from 1897 to 1945 by Andrei S. Markovits and Kenneth Garner; and Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX by Sara Fitzgerald. The authors have said the depth of their work would have been impossible without this archive.

The Michigan Daily Digital Archive would have been impossible without the help of the Kemp Family Foundation.

We include requests for funds for more digitization in just about every communication you receive from the Bentley.

More digitization is a future necessity and a nearly unbounded good for society, but a very heavy financial lift for every paper-based archive in the world.

To support the Bentley’s digitization efforts, please visit: myumi.ch/7ZnBB