Changes

In order to deal with the modern records explosion, archives have devised methods of processing and describing materials at a broad level, rather than at the item-level. This has culminated in what’s becoming a widely adopted approach to archival processing called "More Product, Less Process," where less fine-grained descriptive metadata is created. Except for highly valued materials which may still receive detailed archival description--think Thomas Jefferson's letters--this approach usually does not enable item-level discovery through an archival finding aid. However, it does make collections more readily available and helps repositories move through backlogs of unprocessed collections. Some in the profession have begun to advocate for a similar approach to the digitization of archival and manuscript materials. A growing trend in digitization is the large scale digitization of collections, where the creation of discovery-enabling detailed descriptive metadata for every object is traded for the rapid access to large swaths of collections.