Fitzgerald at the Ransom Center

This interesting press release came across my Google Reader on the acquisition of F. Scott Fitzgerald material by the Ransom Center. The last two sentences caught my eye: "The materials will be accessible once organized and housed. High-resolution press images of a selection of the new materials are available."

Which made me wonder about work-flows and processing. I think its very interesting--and smart--that digital images of some of the materials are already available, even though the collection is not yet fully processed. This will help with additional publicity and give folks a sense of what's there. But it is a double-edged sword. Advance PR may mean phone calls and e-mails about access to the full collection. Does this speed up the processing? Does the collection skip to the front of the processing line? Or, if "more product, less process" is in play maybe its not an issue. In any event, I find it interesting that some digitization of materials appears to happen towards the front end of the process.