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 it 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，大量重要内容仍仅以纸本或微缩胶片等物理介质形式存在。传统对未数字化内容的索引方法依赖人工创建描述聚合层级（如文件夹、档案盒或全宗）的元数据。按照这种索引方式，用户虽然能定位到内容子集，但仍需手动翻阅大量物理介质才能找到目标。本文提出一种补充性方法：通过选择性数字化少量内容作为邻近性索引的基础，从而缩短用户与具体检索目标之间的物理距离。基于35箱部分数字化的美国国务院档案实验表明，以此方式构建的盒级索引可为检索提供有效支撑。