Like several commenters, I thought digitization seemed like an obvious solution: Not only does it improve availability by many orders of magnitude (find and access a box in one phyiscal location vs. search and read from anywhere in the world), but then you can bring to bear all the tools of IT: Search, copy, backup, save, share, annotate, use analytics, organize (the users and archivists can organize the data by multiple schemes simultaneously), etc. But I've learned never to believe that many people looking at a problem for a long time have all overlooked an 'obvious' solution that came to my mind in the first 30 seconds, so the question is: Why aren't they digitizing?

The seminal paper cited in the article[0] - which was more interesting than the article, IMHO - helped me understand: They have very limited resources, and digitizing is expensive. Perhaps the technology world would help by reducing the cost of digitizing, so that they could by default digitize everything and then sort through it (giving the archivist far better tools and making the unprocessed data available for researchers to search). I wonder what that would take - Are the solutions out there? Too expensive? what do the Internet Archive and Google Books do and are those solutions applicable?

Some excerpts from the paper: First, from a list of alternatives for prioritization, you can see the choices they have to make.

4.2 Putting more resources into digitizing collection material and putting it on the web, even if that means fewer collections will be accessible.

And addressing the issue more broadly:

Has digitization changed the rules? After all, more detailed description— the closer to item level the better—greatly facilitates the selection of material to be digitized. If the goal is to find discrete, interesting items amid tens of thou- sands of feet of collections, it is necessary to first ask whether our immense appli- cation of detailed description can be justified simply to ease the hunt for Web-site eye candy. If the goal instead is to identify whole collections, or whole series, that might warrant digitization as Web-accessible research material, then the question becomes more intriguing. A report for the Council on Library and Information Resources states that one of the first questions to ask in any digiti- zation project is “Does the intellectual quality of the source material warrant the level of access made possible by digitizing?”

One can posit this as a chicken/egg problem—how do we know if the col- lection is good enough to digitize if we haven’t already described it to the item level? But more practically, if arrangement and description of the analog mate- rial depend on an initial assessment of the value (or intellectual quality) of the collection in the first place, then finely processed collections will by definition be good candidates for digitization and require less additional descriptive work.

Retrospectively, the decision to digitize all or part of a collection by definition makes the collection a candidate for improved analog processing. “Digital resources depend on the nature and importance of the original source materi- als, but also on the nature and quality of the digitizing process itself—on how well relevant information is captured from the original, and then on how the digital data are organized, indexed, delivered to users, and maintained over time.”

[0] More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing by Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner [ http://www.archivists.org/prof-education/pre-readings/IMPLP/... ]