The ICA AtoM application allows us to link scans of records to their archival descriptions. UNESCO Archives makes available two kinds of scans in AtoM: 1) official scans of complete files and 2) unofficial ‘quick scans’ which are made in order to respond to reference requests.

Official scans are linked to file-level descriptions and have a cover page which indicates the date of scanning. As a rule, these complete scans include every item in a file. Quick scans, however, are often individual documents or a selection of documents from a file that are made to answer a particular question. The scans could be imperfect with pages crooked, for example. Researchers should therefore be alert to the fact that they may not be seeing the full contents of a file when they see a scan without a cover page.