Despite the plethora of born-digital content, vast troves of important content remain accessible only on physical media such as paper or microfilm. The traditional approach to indexing undigitized content is using manually created metadata that describes content at some level of aggregation (e.g., folder, box, or collection). Searchers led in this way to some subset of the content often must then manually examine substantial quantities of physical media to find what they are looking for. This paper proposes a complementary approach, in which selective digitization of a small portion of the content is used as a basis for proximity-based indexing as a way of bringing the user closer to the specific content for which they are looking. Experiments with 35 boxes of partially digitized US State Department records indicate that box-level indexes built in this way can provide a useful basis for search.

翻译：尽管原生数字内容层出不穷，大量重要内容仍仅存于纸质或缩微胶片等物理介质中。传统上，对未数字化内容进行索引的方法依赖于人工创建的元数据，这些元数据在某种聚合层级（如文件夹、资料盒或档案集）上描述内容。通过这种方式被引导至某部分内容的检索者，往往需要手动查阅大量物理介质才能找到目标。本文提出一种补充性方法，通过选择性数字化一小部分内容，基于邻近索引策略缩小用户与目标内容的距离。基于美国国务院35盒部分数字化档案的实验表明，以这种方式构建的资料盒级索引可以为检索提供有效基础。