Thanks!
There are more and more of these. It's an incredible resource and helps to solve what I always called The Archivist's Dilemma. An archivist has two mandates
- make the materials available to researchers
- preserve the materials for all future generations
There has always been a tension there, but online imagery solves a lot of the problem. There are only a handful of scholars who can actually benefit from examining the physical object. Most of us are just looking for the text/images anyway.
My one sadness is that there is something incredible about the experience of passing your days in a archive reading room, calling up documents half a millennium old. There's a smell and a feel and, perhaps most importantly, an assembled community of like-minded scholars. Those things just don't translate online.
Still, it's incredibly handy for those of us who choose to live a zillion miles from good collections.
