"All archival research should be possible 24/7" In 2005, the Amsterdam City Archives set its digital services department the ambitious target of making it possible to access its entire archive at all times. This meant that we needed to start digitizing our archives and collections on a large scale. An important part of our approach is customer-driven: through a scanning-on-demand service, the customer decides which archival documents are digitized. Next to scanning-on-demand, we work on a project basis in which we digitize entire archives or collections, of larger amounts of uniform material. Ten years on, we have met 40 000 client orders and produced 20 million scans, all online for everyone to use. Meanwhile, the customer demand for digitized items continues to increase. At the same time, large digitization projects come our way more often. This requires constant adjustment of our digitization approach and work processes. In 2018, we meet a new challenge: producing 20 000 scans a day. On this scale, an industrial approach as described in this article is not an option anymore, but a necessity.
M. Holtman, N. van Zeeland, "Digitization with Use of Principles from the World of Industry" in Proc. IS&T Archiving 2018, 2018, pp 29 - 32, https://doi.org/10.2352/issn.2168-3204.2018.1.0.7