Residents of Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood advocate for social justice, ca. 1990.

The Freedom House photographs from 1950 to 1975 document citizen participation in school desegregation, urban renewal, and integration in Boston from 1950 to 1975. They give us a firsthand look at the political and racial struggles of people working to get their rights, and in that sense, characterize our "underrepresented groups" theme.

How has digitization changed your role as an archivist?

It's added a whole new function to the archivist's job. It's not as if we didn't have enough to do already—processing the materials, writing grants, and talking with individuals and organizations about collaborating with us to preserve their records. But today, an archivist has to be more technologically savvy than in the past. We create the website and web interface that provides access to the digital collection and work closely with information technologists to help them understand what we need in order to accomplish that.

What's involved in digitizing these materials?

First, we determine whether an entire collection should be digitized or only a portion of it. After the most important material is selected, the items are scanned at a very high resolution, and we create three images, one at 600 dpi for our files, one at a lower resolution for the Web, and the thumbnail, the one you see when you do an online search.

For each image, we enter metadata into a template. Informational metadata helps in searching for specific images and includes the title of the image, who and what is in the picture, and when it was taken. Technical metadata describes what kind of scanner was used, the size of the original image, and other data that helps preserve the digital information. Administrative metadata is for our internal purposes. We might record information about who uses an image and for what purpose.

Is this material better preserved by digitizing it?

Digitizing damaged materials is great because the fragile originals then needn't be handled, but at present—because no one's sure how long the digital copy will last—digitization is not considered a means of preservation. It's considered a means of access and of making this material available to researchers and the public. In the old days, researchers consulted indexes to find collections that might be of interest. The great benefit of having material online is people don't have to travel to the archives, so the scope of research they can do is much less limited.

But isn't something lost when the material isn't in its original form, and researchers can't get a tactile sense of it?

When you're researching older materials, that's sometimes important. For example, if you were writing about medieval manuscripts, you might want to visit the original documents to make sure what you're saying about the medium is accurate. With more recent material such as ours, this might not be as important. We do preserve the originals so the researchers can come in any time and examine them.

How do archivists ensure that their specialized collections augment one another?

The New England Archivists Association holds biannual meetings, and archivists learn about other collections. While Northeastern is known for collecting materials related to underrepresented communities, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard has a fine women's studies archive, and Boston University has 20th century cultural and nursing archives. We do direct people to other archives that might give them a broader context for their research.

What are the challenges of storing the digital material?

This is something we're struggling with, because our digital collection contains about 4,000 images and continues to grow. We've just about filled our server. Our IS department automatically backs up everything daily, but the challenge is to maintain the quality of information as we add more and more.

Where do you see digitization going in the future?

Into the clouds, literally. I think as we acquire more and more digital material, cloud computing will be a cost-effective answer to the storage question.

I also see digitization opening up a way to link documents to related documents. Links on each item could connect to other items in the collection as a way to preserve context. In an archive, context is more important than a single piece of paper. The more we can interconnect our collections on Boston public school desegregation or the Chinese American community or services to the elderly, for example, the more well-rounded and complete research can be.

What's next on your digitization schedule?

We have a fantastic collection on Carmen Pola, a Latina activist who lives in Boston's Mission Hill. She was involved in many local social justice organizations and advocated for the poor, particularly Latinas. She was also one of the early directors of the Puerto Rican Festival in Boston. We're working on sorting and prioritizing her material in preparation for digitizing it.

Are fewer researchers coming onsite as digital collections go online?

I do worry that as our collections go online, researchers won't come in to investigate our other materials. Yet, just last month, we had a 33 percent increase in foot traffic. I think the two approaches can work together, and however people find us, it's very gratifying to see the collections being used.