Digitisation has become an essential part of archival and library strategies to enhance access to
collections. As the digital content is increasing due to large-scale digitisation projects, it is
expected that providing digital access to the analogue collections will eventually reduce the
number of archival records accessed in the reading room. In this paper, we investigate this
issue using two approaches: system dynamics and agent-based modelling. We first analyse real
data in order to identify the dynamic hypothesis of the model. Then, a sensitivity analysis is
conducted on two baseline models to identify scenarios that match the real dataset. Although
the two approaches suceed to simulate the number of requests in the reading room, the
experimental results show that a better fit is obtained in the agent-based model when not only
the number of records that have been accessed and digitised is taken into account, but also the
number of times that such records have been accessed before digitisation. The proposed
model can be used to explore the impact of different digitisation strategies on the decrease in
access requests in the archival and library reading rooms
