A random rant. . . .
I offered to rent a microfilm scanner, it was insanely fast, converted each slide into a jpg and or pdf file. At my own cost. And donate the digitized files either to NARA/NPS and or publish or host them for free.
I was told no, because that presents ownership issues, and it is illegal for me to profit (since I am a business) from NARA and NPS. I asked what about Ancestry, Fold3, and of the other archival services?!?! Oh that’s different. . . .
So I was left with the option of having an over paid government bureaucrat individually PHOTOGRAPH the original documents to the quoted tune of $10k.
There’s no reason that the microfilm rolls paid for by the American people in the 80’s and 90’s so that the original documents didn’t need to be handled, should all be digitized and scanned. You can’t convince me it is anything other than governmental malfeasance.
This is a huuuuuuge thing in archival circles. It's not just NARA/NPS, I ran head on into it in Germany in a huge way as well as a grad student. Long story short there I was flat broke and living off a tiny research stipend, but I also had a rather daunting research schedule. Three major archives in a year, located in three different corners of the country. Sitting down and laboriously reading every document and taking all the notes I would need for writing my dissertation could work, but was a massive waste of my limited time. Of course you could send them to be photocopied by the archivists, but that ranged anywhere from .10 to .50 Euros per page making it prohibitively expensive for a broke grad student. This was around 2010 so the easy answer was just snap a pic of anything that looked promising with a digital camera and do the heavy sorting/organizing/processing once home.
Of course, photographing the documents was strictly, and I do mean strictly, forbidden. The end result was some saving my pennies to get official copies made of the stuff I absolutely could not live without, doing some of the reading/processing on site as criminally inefficient as that was, and doing an extremely lame spy impression where I could. Hide the camera in my pants, snap pictures when and where I could, and work really hard not to get caught. It's an incredibly dumb and incredibly common little dance over there. I've seen people get caught and it sucks. I've also heard some stories about sneaking pictures from some incredibly eminent scholars and in archives ranging from France to India.
As to the why, it's not governmental malfeasance so much as it is archivists, as a profession, being extremely concerned about funding in the short term and their profession in the long term. This is a somewhat cynical take, but it's one that I land on a lot from my own experiences. Basically there's this huge apparatus that needs to be maintained behind the scenes for these documents to stay preserved and organized. It also helps that most archivists are also scholars in their field, people who are actively working with the documents. But the main way that they justify their existence to the people who pay their bills is by the number of people who visit their archive. I had one in Berlin, a small archive where I was camped out for almost six months, where the director came and personally thanked m on my last day saying "you've been great for our numbers this year." It sucks, it's dumb, but it's the way it is. So when an archivist is looking at digitizing a bunch of papers, one of the big things that they have to worry about is if this means that they will have fewer visitors every year because now you can get the docs online.
Another part of the issue - a much smaller one for photography given modern technology and one that frankly I think is only a fig leaf at this point - is that they always have to strike a balance between preservation and accessibility. I've worked on documents (shitty East German carbon paper copies) that literally turned to dust as I handled them. The degradation of paper, especially garbage grade paper that was never intended to last more than a few years, is something archivists are fighting non stop. With the really old stuff you have to be worried about what happens to the inks etc. Flash photography is really bad for all of that, and the few places that will allow photography will still hang you if you use a flash. Again, though, with modern cameras that's a non-issue, especially if you're just looking for a good-enough-for-research picture not a perfectly lit and centered image for publication. My argument is that it's better to dititize the badly degrading documents while we can, but again archivtists are extremely conservative by nature. It also gets into resource allocation - the specific documents I was working with were ones that I was probably the only person on the planet interested in - I strongly suspect some of them hadn't been opened since some East German archivist tucked them away 50+ years earlier.
With a microfilm scanner, however, the potential for damage could have genuinely been a concern. Basically, the fast scanners eat stuff sometimes. I've seen it happen myself. It stinks when it's a microfilm copy in a university library, but it really really sucks when it's the only copy around because it's the single archival copy and the original documetns were sent to the incinerator to free up space ten presidential administrations ago. I was tangentially involved in a big digitization project at one point and there was absolutely a number for how much of the documetnation would be destroyed by the process that they needed to get below a specific number. It's a cost/time vs. damage thing: it's safe if you do each page individually but that is very labor intensive, but anythign with an automatic feed can jam and destroy what you're working with.
A final thing I will add is that it might also hinge on credentials. Which isn't right, but at the end of the day people who have the right connections can get treated differently. A few years back I did some contracting work on a project that intersected NARA and official US military archives. I know for a fact that one of the full time archivists on staff would take plenty of pictures at NARA. He had a little home-made wooden photography jig that he would bring in with him every day, set up on his desk at the archive, put his phone on it, and happily tap away taking pics. He gave me the low down on how to get that access if I ever needed it, including getting the little "non-classified" slip to stick on any documents that still had an un-canceled classifiction stamp on them.* I don't know if that was a courtesy only extended to official government researchers at the time. Looking at their webpage now it looks like the public can photograph as long as they don't use flash? It's something I'd write to them and ask about before planning a trip, but really nice if that's the case.
*they should have all been canceled out when they were taken out of whatever miltiary arhive they lived in before that and fed into NARA, but it's a lot of paper and sometimes that doens't happen. The archivsts are loath to stamp or write on 70+ year old paper to fix that, so that's the solutoin.
edit: which is all to say that there's more to it than simple governmental malfeasance or some other misconduct, it's a massive and ongoing conversation inside the archival profession and one that is constantly butting up against outside factors.
Here's an example. You've digitized your archives, but you also have rules that dictate how your collection can be used for commercial purposes. Now you find out your entire online offerings got scraped by ChatGPT and the like. What do you do? There's probably an argument for some kind of legal action, but that's out of your hands. Meanwhile it's a headache for you and your bosses, and now there are concerned citizens writing in because they heard about it. PII is already kind of a nightmare for NARA, especially with the military documents. God there are so many SSNs alone floating around in that stuff, it's not even funny. So now, because of the digitization project that you pushed so hard a few years ago to get all those USN log books from the 60s open to the public, you can ask ChatGPT to give you the SSN for Joe Smith who served on the USS
Big Boat in the Cold War and. . . . it will give it to you. Joe is still alive, by the way, and his kids are very unhappy about all those credit cards that just opened up. And remember, you're a government employee and it's your career on the line because YOU were the one pushing this modern, digital approach.
That's a fairly hyperbolic example, but it's also not out of the realm of possibility. The ship example was chosen carefully because I've seen ship rosters at NARA that listed everyone out by SSN. The information is out there.
Thinking specifically about the microfilm scanner, the more I think about it the more I suspect no one wanted to be the person to sign off on you scanning them in case you ended up mulching a few. Remember: even though you're competent and responsible they are also fielding similar requests from a huge number of yahoos. It sucks, and I'm not going to defend it as just or right, but a lot of the time the only good way they have to filter for some level of responsibility is institutional affiliation (e.g. working with a university or the like and framing the digitization project in those terms). My guess is that that's why the likes of Ancestry can get permission. They've got the money to hire people with the credentials to prove they know how to handle the documents.
Even then sometimes it doesn't work. German archives are constantly having to fight people trying to snip famous signatures (especially Nazis) out of documents to sell to collectors, and there has been more than one case where the person cutting the pages did have a good institutional affiliation.
