But in a few years some enterprising grad student or post doc will earn accolades by re-scanning some old sources, taking into account some important metadata which right now is irrelevant. Perhaps labeling or annotating the result in some novel way.
It's interesting to think though that maintaining a dictionary once meant having a large set of filing cabinets containing sheets of words sliced and diced in every way you might need.
As they should! These sort of things are properties of the knowledge building processes themselves, and that is precisely one of the goals of research work - to uncover insights in places where people before you thought there were none.
A digital copy of a painting is way better than no copy at all, but it's not a replacement. You can't carbon date a digital scan, etc.
So not only is there so much texture there, but even a single manufacturer's individual blank pages differ dramatically because of physical wood fibers within the page.
