The answer may be responsible minimalism. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible. Access and Preservation To digitize a document is different than preserving it, the goal of preservation being to provide access to an original item. Digitization complements preservation by protecting the original and providing far superior access. A master file is saved in the highest quality possible.
Derivatives are files created from masters for display purposes.
The masters of scanning files are often saved in this format. A popular bitmapped graphics file format which is widely used on the Web, because the files compress well, but losslessly. A format that is becoming very popular due to its high compression capability. It provides lossy compression. The rate of compression can be controlled, resulting in high or low quality images.