I think we need to take the long tail into account, how might these images be used in 25, 50 or even 100 years from now. I feel its important to capture at a quality level that allows for multiple uses at the back end of the work flow.

There is so much information held in climate controlled vaults all around the world, information that is not readily available to scholars, let alone the general public. I am a firm believer in making all that content available to the masses.

Although access is ultimately the most important outcome, of digitization, without a certain level of quality…the exercise becomes futile. If you can only accurately OCR 80% of the content digitized, you only get part of the story. What if the cure for cancer is out there, just waiting for two or three documents to be digitized, and linked through a data set, and 20%of the information isn’t available to researchers because of poor quality. Our hopes of finding a cure, become that much difficult, or maybe the cure is never found.