Funding. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities struggle to get funded, especially with disciplines like history bein

Funding. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities struggle to get funded, especially with disciplines like history being in the crosshairs of conservatives. Archives barely get by and often have to make hard decisions about what the preserve based on their budgets. And then going from physical media to digitization is a nontrivial expense. I think that preservation of art and history is amazingly valuable and I think that efforts to make this stuff available digitally is amazingly valuable, but these aren't profitable enterprises so they depend on a trickle of grant funding.