n.a digital copy of an analog recordBreaden 2006, 33As information seekers rely more on digital resources, institutions providing virtual representations of holdings may benefit from increased collections usage, justifying further funding while safeguarding source materials through use of digital surrogates.Conway 2010, 426Although meaning originates with the source, the ways that users see photographs online may be influenced by their encounters with the digital surrogates themselves, which carry with them a mix of visual, technological, and archival properties.Morley 2010, 148Archivists are increasingly making nonprint collections accessible online by creating digital surrogates linked to finding aids that require detailed item-level metadata.Smart and Young 2013, 6To date, digital collections at the Harold B. Lee Library do not generally represent complete physical collections, which is just one difference between special collections’ physical collections and their digital surrogates.Fernández and Paschild 2013, 7The original materials remain with the individuals, communities, or institutions while their digital surrogates are made freely accessible online.Gracy 2013, 358For him, the current priorities set up by the organization continue to limit the available resources, which allow him to create acceptable surrogates for the user to assess the content, but do not allow him to support the creation of digital surrogates that could serve as replacements for analog originals.Miller 2013, 528We might also consider one-time handling of a nature we might not repeatedly allow in the reading room if the end result is a digital surrogate that can stand in for most or all future use.Murphy et al. 2015, 441For these materials, the team’s digitization assistant needed to significantly edit the digital surrogate in Photoshop to correct contrast and tone. This image correction to improve legibility privileged content over preservation of the appearance of the physical item.National Archives 2016, 4This document also covers the scanning of records where the resultant images will become digital surrogates with the original paper records being retained and remaining the legal public record. For purposes of clarity we refer to these images as digital surrogates.
Notes
A digital surrogate is merely any digital copy of a record on any analog medium, such as paper, parchment, motion-picture film, analog audio, and analog video. The reasons for producing a digital surrogate vary but include protection or replacement of the original, creation of a copy for the archives so the original may be retained by the creator, improving accessibility, or creation of a more legible or audible version of the original. The creation of digital surrogates may be confined to the production of a duplicate of one record in a collection or to the production of surrogates for every record therein. The precursor to the digital surrogate, of course, was the micrographic copy.
