Editing Digitization (section)

=== Expense ===
Cost of equipment, staff time, metadata creation, and digital storage media make large scale digitization of collections expensive for all types of [[cultural institution]]s.<ref name=":162">{{cite journal | doi=10.5860/rbm.13.1.369 | title=Balancing Boutique-Level Quality and Large-Scale Production: The Impact of "More Product, Less Process" on Digitization in Archives and Special Collections | year=2012 | last1=Sutton | first1=Shan C. | journal=RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage | volume=13 | issue=1 | pages=50–63 | doi-access=free }}</ref>

Ideally, all institutions want their digital copies to have the best image quality so a high-quality copy can be maintained over time.<ref name=":162"/> In the mid-long term, digital storage would be regarded as the more expensive part to maintain the digital archives due to the increasing number of scanning requests.<ref name="Duran Casablancas">{{Cite journal |last1=Duran Casablancas |first1=Cristina |last2=Holtman |first2=Marc |last3=Strlič |first3=Matija |last4=Grau-Bové |first4=Josep |date=2022-10-12 |title=The end of the reading room? Simulating the impact of digitisation on the physical access of archival collections |journal=Journal of Simulation |volume=18 |issue=2 |pages=191–205 |doi=10.1080/17477778.2022.2128911 |s2cid=252883425 |issn=1747-7778|doi-access=free }}</ref> However, smaller institutions may not be able to afford such equipment or manpower, which limits how much material can be digitized, so archivists and librarians must know what their patrons need and prioritize digitization of those items.<ref name=":17">{{Cite web |title=6.6 Preservation and Selection for Digitization |url=https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.6-preservation-and-selection-for-digitization |access-date=2023-04-14 |website=Northeast Document Conservation Center |language=en}}</ref> To help the information institutions to better decide the archives worth of digitization, Casablancas and other researchers used a proposed model to investigate the impact of different digitization strategies on the decrease in access requests in the archival and library reading rooms.<ref name="Duran Casablancas" /> Often the cost of time and expertise involved with describing materials and adding metadata is more than the digitization process.<ref name=":114"/>