Two main reasons why "everything", especially historic photographs, isn't online: permissions and time.

Permissions: Photos taken in 1948 or before are out of copyright in Canada. Photos taken in 1949 or later are IN COPYRIGHT in Canada. This means that unless the archives has specific permission from the copyright holder to put the photos online (effectively, publishing them), we probably can't. However, we can, and often do, end you copies of images privately on request, for your own research purposes. That's legally quite different from putting them online. Just ask!

Not even everything that has been digitized is freely available online, nor can it be. But that doesn't mean it's inaccessible.

Time: You may have used an office scanner to make digital copies of a big stack of papers. The machine sucks in a page at a time, scans at high speed, and spits out the originals in another stack.

That is not how archival scanning works.

A third, rarer, reason: preservation. Some materials are in poor physical condition or otherwise difficult to photograph - think oversize photos, large rolled maps or drawings, torn or buckled photographs, old papers with stiff folds, large books with weak spines or broken joints. Many of them can be copied, but it will take extra time, skills, equipment, facilities... and money.

Just now I am preparing a collection of photographs for digitization and posting online. It's not a big collection, as shelf space goes: 2 shoeboxes. But they contain almost 2000 photos, late 20th century colour prints, and for each photo there are several steps to take. So why not just hurry up and scan them all?

1) number each photo.

Why bother? They weren't numbered or arranged in alphabetical order before, so if one gets out of place, a number is the easiest way to make sure it gets refiled correctly.

2) scan each photo, front and back.

Why bother? Digital images of the photos are the main point of the exercise, and the backs are heavily annotated with contextual information that wasn't recorded separately.

3) check, straighten and crop images.

Why bother? human or software error during scanning can result in missing, distorted, or crooked images.

4) rename the files.

Why bother? It's not possible to get the scanner to automatically name the image files what we want. The filenames need to correspond to the photo numbers so that both the in-house computers and the online Flickr platform will display them in an order that reflects the arrangement of the originals. The filename needs to include the street address as this is the easiest way for Flickr to find the image during a search.

5) watermark the images.

Why bother? Although these particular images are in copyright, the Archives does have permission to share them online. Watermarks are not about preventing use of the images. But we know that images will be copied to personal web pages, local history Facebook groups etc, and users hardly ever include complete or accurate source citations when sharing photos. (If you do, well done. Most don't.)

Watermarks provide a way for potential researchers to find their way back to the source archive and collection. If you don't normally bother to include source information when sharing archival photos, please do! It's a courtesy to acknowledge the archives' work in making the photo available to you, and it's kind to let others know where they can find the same interesting material that you did. Why reinvent the wheel? Thank you for citing! If you need a watermark-free image, e.g. for publishing, please contact the archives.

6) create album and upload watermarked images

Images are kept private until the next steps have been done. In the meantime they can be shared with individual enquirers using sharing links.

• create album description including any copyright information.
• when uploading, include as much as possible in a common description for all the images.
• edit individual image captions to include specific information about the photo or the subject
• within Flickr, add subject tags and map locations to images as appropriate
• put any separate collection description, or catalogue (that's a whole other project), online, create links between the catalogue and the online photo album(s)
• finally, make the photos public, and publicize the new online collection.