Showing off Archival Holdings with YouTube

I've never been much for history and archeology. Most often I see it as: digitize the artifact and then forget about it.  The way I like to think of it is the idea or the piece of knowledge encoded in the artifact is what counts.  Once that has been extracted the thing is negligible and no longer serves a real important purpose.  However in the world of digitization the process of extracting that piece of information is a daunting.  There is a fairly lopsided distribution of things to digitize versus time to digitize them.  Enter the Archival Finding Aid and the distribution power of youtube:

The Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald Archival Collection/Introduction video is a perfect hybrid of digitization versus promotion.  Scanning all the documents in the collection would most likely be fairly prohibitive but digitizing just enough of them to create the video does a great job at letting people know it exists.

Taking it one step further and digitizing the finding aid in a persistent way. (In this case at: http://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/2711) and now a persistent record of the collections is created that gives a good indication of what researches might find if they were interested in the font.

In all great solution.  Many thanks to Brock University Special Collections and Archives for the collaboration.