Assessing the value of digital surrogates
I had an interesting meeting with colleagues yesterday to discuss how we manage digital surrogates - digitised versions of physical items we hold in the archives. At the Borthwick Institute we do a fair amount of digitisation for a variety of reasons. These range from the large scale digitisation projects such as the York Cause Papers , to digitisation to create images for publications and exhibitions to single pages of Parish Registers for family history researchers. As I am in the process of setting up a digital archive for the Borthwick Institute, effectively managing these digital surrogates also becomes my concern. The need to preserve these items is not as pressing as for born digital data (because they are only copies, not originals) however, to start to build up the collections that we have in digital form, to allow access to users who can not visit our searchroom, and to avoid having to carry out the same work twice, appropriate creation and management of this data is importan