Increasingly, libraries provide access to their special collections beyond the physical walls of reading rooms in the form of photographic facsimiles hosted online. There are clear benefits to this kind of expanded access, but digitization can never be perfectly neutral: photographs and scans can only ever serve as partial representations of physical objects, and decisions have to be made about what gets digitized in the first place.

Sarah Werner, who previously served as Digital Media Strategist at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is the author of the forthcoming “Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800: A Practical Guide.”