This really is a shame--it presumes one has a crystal ball to divine what, 20 years hence, may hold "historical significance."

Insofar as we are in the information age, why would we discount any information from an entity that deals with history in as significant a way as the FBI?

I am a retired FBI agent--to that end, I cop to filling my share of pro forma documents (the FBI is famous, or notorious, for having a form for EVERYTHING).

OTOH, as a current faculty member at a tier 1 research university, I recognize the necessity for information; and once something like this is gone, it's gone. Forever. And despite the good intentions of the folks who decide these matters, I'm not sure it's fair of us to place on them the weighty responsibility of deciding "historical significance."

Is there any reason we can't make an investment to digitize all this stuff? True, it's gonna be a big chunk of change upfront, but dang.

You mean aside from the fact that digitizing it only guarantees that in ten or twenty years it will be lost forever? Oh, no reason at all...

Digitizing things doesn't preserve them. It just puts them in a new format that archivists know we can't preserve forever - you have to contend with obsolescence of hardware and software, and the problem of storing files long-term without fragmenting or otherwise damaging them, or losing them completely when something crashes.

If you think you want to update them into new file types to deal with obsolescence, you have to realize that data conversion into new formats takes vast amounts of time, not to mention memory. I remember hearing one estimate that just migrating all of the digital information archives have stored now into current formats would take something like a trillion years. At which point you're just going to have to do it all over again, because whatever you started migrating it to will be obsolete itself...

There are all kinds of files stored away that the government (and others) thought would be perfectly preserved if it was left digital. Now no one can access it. Some of the records of moon landings fall under that heading, for example.

Oh, and archivists aren't worried about twenty years from now. Our aim is to preserve what has significance for the long term. As in, hundreds of years. Which is why we have subject degrees and specializations, so we can figure out what that might be and not rely on guesswork. (Records managers, who are the people who decide what the FBI sends to NARA and what it destroys, have a slightly different focus. You would have to find one of them to ask about it.)

So why not digitize records that are about to be destroyed anyway and therefore extend the life of that information another couple of decades?

Doing it as the records are pulled from the shelves would not be nearly as cumbersome as trying to digitize everything all at once, and at least we'd have it around that much longer.

Actually, NARA is digitizing some files, as is the FBI. But it takes manpower, and both agencies's archivist divisions are understaffed. "Just scanning" takes a lot of time, and requires careful handling. Some of these documents are faded, ripped, etc already. And we are talking about thousands of records.

We just don't have the manpower.