Digitizing items requires much more consideration than merely taking a photo and uploading it to your site. How does one capture the essence of the item in a virtual environment? When creating an archive, one must consider how to convey as much information as possible for any item: size, use, material, color, sound, and, yes, smell. Also, one must consider the readability of text images. For non-text images, it seems that video provides greater information than a still image. One can compare sizes of similar items or at least add scale, although that can be done with a still image the scale item can be temporarily added then removed from a video thus keeping the focus on the main item. Videos help to provide sound; one could go so far as to narrate the item, but metal lids do provide a sound that indicates material and a bit of information on weight. One can get a better sense of the image as a whole in video. Are there marks on the bottom of some items indicating where and when something was created? Is the appearance of the item uniform throughout? It is easier to see this on video, although multiple photographs could be utilized as well. The big question regarding use of video would be the size of the file. If uploading many videos, would that be burdensome for the site or for the user.

Digitizing photographs, while seemingly straightforward, just scan photo and upload, also requires much more consideration, especially given the software that is now available to edit and enhance photographs. Do you upload the photo as it is in its current condition? Do you upload the photo after “repairing” wear and tear and other “defects” of time? Does color correction or changing the contrast to make certain elements more visible change the meaning of the photograph? Does it then become a different artifact?

While clearly digitization of historical sources has increased the opportunities for scholarship by making sources in far away places available to researchers who could otherwise not access them, the scholar now has a new set of questions to ask of the sources on his or her screen. Questions not just of scholarly significance but of accuracy of representation and even of the contextualization of the content collections.