Digitization happens daily on a multitude of scales. From scanning documents on your machine at home, to large-scale digitization productions at museums and libraries, all for digital accessibility or preservation.

The opening page from a folio of correspondence between the American Bank Note Company and the Republic of Colombia. This folio contains postage stamps, papel sellado (sealed paper samples), postal cards, consumer stamps, and National Revenue Stamps. It spans the years 1913, 1914, and 1915. 

The National Numismatic Collection (NNC) is America’s collection of monetary and transactional objects. This collection contains roughly 1.6 million objects representing every inhabited continent and spans a timeline of more than 3,000 years of human history. The collection consists of banknotes, coins, paper money, financial documents, scales, weights, printing plates, credit cards, and more!

This is an example of sealed paper samples. It would be included along with correspondence detailing its price.

In 2015, The Smithsonian began a project to digitize the paper portion of the National Numismatic Collection. This project contained 250,000 paper artifacts, which a team of twenty worked to “rapid-capture” digitize. They used a custom-made digitization conveyor system and worked through approximately 3,500 sheets a day. Digitizing this much material by hand, without the rapid-capture machine, would take years!

Here is the paper sample from the envelope in Image 2. Note the watermark. 

Relative to the large-scale project undertaken at The Smithsonian, the Robert A. Mason Digital Library team is working to digitize a similar portion of the American Philatelic Research Library’s special collections. Given by donor Arthur Morowitz, we are beginning to digitize over 80 archival document boxes of correspondence from the American Bank Note Company archives. Now known as the American Banknote Corporation, or ABCorp, the American Bank Note Company has been active since 1795 and globally served as the primary source for printing currency, stamps, and other transactional materials. Our collection contains primarily philatelic materials, of course! Including all kinds of stamps, sample printing paper, stamp samples, stamp prices, and printing process information. We have correspondence from all over the world!

Here is our collection of 82 archival document boxes containing American Bank Note correspondence. 

A portion of this collection is available for public viewing upon request at the American Philatelic Research Library; however, most of the collection physically resides in the non-public archives area. In time, these rare and fragile materials will be made available in the Robert A. Mason Digital Library for patrons to access online! So far, we have uploaded 33 of these documents, which you can find here. Additionally, we have digitized 9,103 journals comprised of 363,701 individual pages, 106 exhibits comprised of 7,127 pages, and more!

Here is the inside of box 25, just to serve as an example of the materials these archival boxes contain.

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