The papers of George C. Marshall are organized into more than 250 archival boxes and kept in the vault at the George C. Marshall Foundation, making the papers available for research. The Foundation has embarked on a project to digitize the entire collection of Marshall Papers, beginning with 40 boxes from the World War II years, when Marshall worked at the Pentagon.
There are many benefits to digitization.
Accessibility
What may be the most obvious benefit is almost certainly the most important: digitization vastly increases accessibility. Physical documents and photos can only be in one place at a time, and as a result, researchers must travel to the archives. This can cost considerable time and money, especially as the Marshall Foundation holds items that are of interest to researchers across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it painfully obvious that we cannot take the ability of travel for granted. Even when researchers can secure the funding necessary to come to the Foundation, there are always limits on the time they can spend here. Digitizing collections means researchers are freed from the need to secure funding for travel and no longer so tightly bound by time limitations. The accessibility provided by digitization allows for a greater quantity and quality of research as more people can spend more time with their desired information.
Organization
Speaking of desired information, digitized collections allow researchers to spend less time finding what they want and more time gathering information. For example, if one wishes to find General Marshall’s writings about World War II’s Operation Husky, a natural place to start would be combing through his papers from July-August 1943. While this will almost certainly include other information that is not of use to the researcher, it also precludes references or further thoughts Marshall might have made and had later—such as around the time of Operation Overlord 10 months later—to say nothing of relevant mentions in other types of documents. However, with developments in text recognition, it is now possible to make digitized documents searchable—even handwritten papers and letters. Thus, rather than going through stacks of papers from a given time frame and picking out what is needed, a researcher can search “Operation Husky” and be presented with all items that contain the phrase. Such a search can be further filtered by date, document type, source, etc. Researchers are given more of what they need, and less of what they don’t.
Preservation and Future-Proofing
Despite archivists’ ceaseless efforts, the unavoidable fact of life is that physical artifacts and documents erode with handling and use. UV light exposure fades inks, turning pages wears the fibers of the paper, and so on. Digitization negates these downsides; a PDF or TIFF does not fade when opened on a screen, and scrolling through a document’s pages does not wear the paper. There is understandable concern that file formats could pose problems in the future, as anyone who has attempted to open an old computer file whose format is no longer supported. However, as digital archives become larger and more common, the industry has addressed these concerns, such as specifying a format known as PDF/A (PDF/Archival) that makes files and documents 100% self-contained and guarantees usability for decades and beyond.
This work of archivists, digitizers, and computer scientists means that the irreplaceable information in the Marshall Foundation’s archives will be available to more researchers than ever before, for now and for future generations.
Ethan Davis, from Rockbridge County, is a data science graduate student at the University of Arizona.
Credits:
Text by Ethan Davis. Photos by Glen Carpenter and Melissa Davis.