I am in line with Peter on this. If there's not much use of them, why go 
through the effort to digitize them. Wouldn't it be better to start with 
new requests and only scan in those as needed, if at all?

When I worked  as a university archivist, the library asked me to 
accession what I recall was about 10 boxes worth of applications and 
privilege letters from faculty and officers (usually granting exemptions 
to normal access to their researchers). These records dated back at least 
40 years and the head of the office insisted that they had some 
administrative value, but mostly historical value -- simply because they 
were old. (The admin value was never ever explained -- because it 
couldn't.) I flatly and politely refused to accession them. In addition to 
Peter's reason for not scanning them, I also informed the office that the 
university librarian required all circulation records and applications 
destroyed after 6 months -- a reaction to the USA PATRIOT Act. These are 
records, in my opinion that have a short term value and are generally not 
worth the effort and cost to digitize them, at least for the older ones. 
Further inquiry found that the Circulation Office maintained dual systems 
to handle the paper records while populating the electronic system with 
new records. It happened that these older paper records were forgotten in 
a basement closet when all the other paper records were destroyed, and 
they didn't want to deal with destroying the recently found cache. 

The truth is they survived very well without knowing about these 10 boxes 
of records and by that proved that the records had no value. While they 
did not inquire about scanning them, I would have re-stated what I wrote 
above as a reason not to scan them.

Stephen Cohen, Records Manager
MetLife \ Legal Affairs
1095 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10036-6796
212-578-2373
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