A Scan For All Seasons

Sometimes people just do things because they can, not necessarily because it is a good idea. The famous mountain climber's rejoinder to the question of why ("because its there") was uttered by a fellow who died on the slopes of Mount Everest, and we heard recently of some poor unfortunate who choked to death at a summer hot dog eating contest. Sure, he might have been able to down thirty dogs in two minutes, but was it a good idea?

Scanning historical documents is another thing people can do that is not necessarily a good idea. They take the individual photographs or pieces of paper from a collection and produce terabytes of images that must have "metadata" applied to them. This is done so that people can feel like they are doing "research" in their pajamas at 2:00 am while taking a break from watching cute cat videos on the internet. But woe to that archivist who attempts to resist the insatiable demand of Information Scientists for documents to scan. Their predictions of death for any archive that does not "get with the scanning program" are supposed to be a metaphor for creeping irrelevance, but what if they mean it literally? Here at True Archives we get a bad feeling about all of this!