The ultimate goal of this website is to provide a complete collection of material relevant to our project scope, including all the available primary source materials. Until that goal is reached, however, we will necessarily have to prioritize which materials are added to this website. There is no strict formula for prioritization, but the following factors must be weighed (in no particular order):
- Subject. Proposed materials or collections must conform to the project's historical and geographic scope. Those only peripherally related will be given lower priority.
- Authoritative Source. Primary historical sources will be given priority for digitization over secondary sources. Sources generally regarded as being more reliable will be given preference.
- Copyright. Materials that are clearly in the public domain will be given priority for digitization. Where public domain status is questionable, a decision will be made on a case by case basis. When materials are under copyright restrictions, they will not be digitized unless permission is likely to be easily obtainable.
- Provenance. Materials that can be completely or partially described, captioned, labeled, or cataloged will be given priority for digitization. Material of unclear origin will be handled on a case by case basis depending on factors such as the need for research, etc.
- Ease of Digitization. Materials that can be easily digitized will be given priority over materials that require extensive manual transcription. For example, clean typeset text can be scanned and converted by optical character recognition programs relatively easily, whereas manuscripts must be laboriously deciphered and re-typed by hand. In some cases, difficult but high priority materials may be digitized as page images until time is available to convert them to searchable text.
- Extent. Materials of unusual bulk can take a great deal of effort to digitize, and may be given lower priority than materials that may be more quickly converted.
- Accessibility. Materials that are hard to access due to being rare or out-of-print or that are only available to a limited audience will be given priority for digitization.
- Diversity. Materials that represent the cultural, geographic, and/or economic diversity of this period of history will be given priority.
- Value, Demand. Materials that have high research or educational value, or are of particular interest to a key audience, will have high priority for digitization.
- Potential for Added Value. Materials for which access will have a high potential for added value in the digital environment will be given priority. Examples of added value that the materials may lend themselves to include:
- Creation and/or addition of supplemental resources to allow users to better understand, navigate, and use the collection
- Linkages between materials
- Virtual collections of materials based around a creator, topic, subject, or similar theme
- New metadata, description, and finding aids in electronic form
- The ability to search through the body of electronic text
- New ways to use or analyze the originals
- Duplication of Effort. Materials that are publicly available in digital form elsewhere at a level of quality and access that meets the needs of our intended audience will not be digitized. Where appropriate, links will be provided.
- Availability of Volunteers. If a volunteer can provide support in the form of time, equipment, or funding to digitize materials to our standards, those materials may be given greater priority to take advantage of these opportunities.
- Availability of Resources. Consumption of computer resources will also be considered. Digitized materials that take large amounts of disk space, or that take excessive amounts of time to download, may have to be left off the website. The usual offender is a large collection of uncompressed images. Compression and re-sizing can usually address this problem, but this is laborious and be not be given high priority.