Archival considerations in the development of Hoover's poster digitization project are described in the winter 2009 issue of the Society of California Archivists Newsletter (scroll down to page 7)
“This is Hoover’s first in–house, systematic digitization project, and its poster collection was an easy choice. As one of the largest such collections in the country, it is one of our most heavily used collections. Poster colors and imagery are well suited to Internet display, and the powerful visuals overcome language factors that limit use of Hoover’s archival collections to researchers fluent in a particular language. The impact of posters as visual images is clear to anyone who remembers the intense controversy sparked by the “Sun Mad Raisins” poster on the cover of the winter 2003 American Archivist. From a practical perspective, the posters represented low-hanging fruit, with item-level cataloging and 35 mm slide photography completed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that ended in 1985. As an added benefit, the project would expedite many reproduction orders for the posters, freeing staff resources for other work.”
