Over the last decades, institutions with archival holding have invested important resources to offer access to digitized items. These “digital treasures” are thus included as primary sources to free access portals, but they do not have a transformation process nor generate economic returns.

The challenges of the digital age are moving memory institutions into new business models, and developing institutional enterprises around digitization. The rapidly changing technology is facilitating a period of experimentation and evaluation of new models. Digital collections have enormous potential for changing the way that information is used, and for developing new ways of preserving, collecting, organizing, propagating and accessing knowledge.