The biggest story in publishing so far this week has to be HarperCollins' announcement that they are in the process of digitizing their entire archives and will make it searchable and presumably, available for users to browse (within reason.) As originally reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, HC wants to make this a worldwide initiative and the prospect would trump other publishers (such as Random House) which currently makes its archives available internally, but not externally.

No doubt plenty of publishing pundits will be dissecting what this means in relation to Google Print and library archives and all the other controversy-inducing topics du jour, but I'd like to add an additional salvo: HarperCollins' archives stretch way back into the annals of the companies it acquired: Collins for reference, Harper & Row (and prior to that, Harper & Brothers) for trade. And included amongst these archives aren't just the books that were published, but the correspondence between authors and their editors, or between company stalwarts. To make such correspondence available to researchers and other interested parties would be nothing short of invaluable -- for example, take the collected writings of noted Harper & Row children's editor Ursula Nordstrom. Some were collected in 1998's DEAR GENIUS, but when I read the book, the first thing I wanted to do was read more of her letters. All of them, in fact. And if the possibility exists, I'd more than welcome it.