All Text Considered: A Perspective on Mass Digitizing and Archival Processing

Amid stagnant or diminishing resources, archival repositories are increasingly expected to digitize entire collections for the Internet. Yet many cannot eliminate their backlogs of unprocessed collections, let alone digitize and post them online. This article explores the idea of coupling robust collection-level descriptions to mass digitization and optical character recognition to provide full-text search of unprocessed and backlogged modern collections, bypassing archival processing and the creation of finding aids.