One Great Reason to Digitize Your Historical Documents
As more museums and archives digitize their historical materials and as more researchers use electronic resources as their main tool for gathering information, items left in paper form are at risk of disappearing from our collective cultural memory. So what’s the problem?
The problem is we potentially are leaving our history filled with gaping holes. There is a sense that all the world’s records and knowledge are contained on the web, but we haven’t begun to see what is missing from our local archives, libraries, and institutions on the web. Materials 
left in paper form and not scanned and made accessible online run the risk of being neglected and lost to the great majority of users.
There is no doubt that in the last decade the digitization of historical materials has been ambitious. For many schools and institutions, putting collections online for accessibility and preservation is a priority. Even with these motivations, let’s look at how little of our historical documents are being digitized. An example is the Library of Congress, only 10% of the materials will be digitized in the near future (yes - that statistic I found on the internet). It makes me wonder who decides what 10% is important and then what happens to the other 90%. There is the impression from students and researchers that the only valuable records they need would be online, but they could be missing a big chunk of the story. What is left behind in boxes at storage centers is still valuable to us. Safeguarding our history and telling the whole story is the best reason I can think of to digitize as many historical records as possible.
