It Could Take 1800 Years to Convert the Paper Records . . . .

On March 10, 2007 the U.S. National Archives estimated that at the current rate of digitization of its 9 billion text records, it could take 1800 years to convert the paper text records in the National Archives to digital form. This estimate came from an article in The New York Times entitled History Digitized (and Abridged), which pointed out that economic and copyright considerations required the digitization of library and archival collections to be very selective.