I have been steadily scanning every document that I think is worthy of scanning and putting them to a pretty elaborate filing scheme. When I get done I will have several thousand documents scanned and then the shredder will get a work out of it’s lifetime.
But imagine being in charge of digitizing every article ever produced by the New York Times. That boggles even my brain. I know they microfilmed a lot of newspapers for years and that you had to be in the town to try and track articles down via a microfiche system in your local library.
Now imagine being able to do reference work on-line via the web and have access to all the media records ever published wow what a resource.
Talk about empowerment well it has been completed and all the New York Times articles that were ever published are now digitized and can be searched using a elaborate searching systems [Source Wired]