Document-level searchability? How a small library is digitising the George C. Marshall Papers
Abstract
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when libraries and archives shuttered, the George C. Marshall Foundation reassessed its long-term strategy to make its historical records available to the public. As few researchers could visit the collection in person, the foundation decided to meet the public where they were: online. By the end of the year, the foundation had committed to a multi-year, multi-phase project to digitise Marshall’s papers (a collection of more than 250 archival boxes) and to make every document individually searchable — a feat that would challenge many larger repositories. This paper examines how a small library, with a limited staff, developed and launched a document-level digitisation project, and discusses the lessons learned along the way. With the first phase of the project completed in late 2024, the paper details the development of the project, how decisions, large and small, were made with little precedent or best-practice guidance and what the future holds for such a small library tackling such an ambitious project. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
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Author's Biography
Melissa Davis is Director of Library and Archives for the George C. Marshall Foundation. She received her master in library science degree from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 2007. She has worked in both school and public libraries, and enjoyed 11 years as an academic librarian specialising in history and foreign languages.
Dr Meghan Ashley Vance is a historian at the US Naval History and Heritage Command. Dr Vance joined the Marshall Foundation during her doctoral candidacy and helped launch the metadata component of the digitisation project. She continues to serve as a subject matter expert and, alongside a team of historians, processes digitised files for their eventual upload to the library catalogue. She received her master’s from the University of Central Florida and her doctorate from Texas A&M University. She has also completed an internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the US Army Center of Military History. Her monograph, ‘An Army for the Cold War: European Command in Germany, 1947–1952’, will be published in early 2026.
