The Colorado Digitization Project is a collaborative initiative involving the state's archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums. The project includes statewide standards for applying metadata and regional scanning centers for image capture. The first phase of the project is a digital collection of 125 oral history transcripts from civil rights figures such as Fanny Lou Hamer, Lawrence Guyot, and Hollis Watkins. Digitization is sometimes insufficient for conveying physical attributes of a record, about the binding of a book or fine detail on oversize objects like maps. But as containers for content and basic physical attributes, digital surrogates are vastly more accessible and user friendly than microfilm, which remains the predominant reformatting option for primary materials.
Authority is also important.
Establishing the reliability of primary sources is a fundamental part of the historical method. But just as in the analog world, historians will look to reputable information professionals to obtain the best online primary evidence on a given topic. Also, the fact remains that effective electronic research only occurs if the evidence historians need exists online. Most primary sources will not be available on the Internet in the foreseeable future. The expense to digitize the entire holdings of a repository are simply too great.