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 content 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