Libraries and other memory institutions have throughout history developed a range of methods and tools for transmitting full texts between material carriers and across media family borders. In this sense, library digitization belongs to the same tradition as 20th century microfilming and the ancient transcribing of manuscripts. The Gutenberg era marked a sharp decline in this full text transmitting business, and libraries devoted their time to producing bibliographical knowledge organization (KO) labels for documents rather than reproducing the full documents themselves. With digital reproduction technologies however, libraries have drawn a historic circle. They are yet again dedicating much energy and attention to the full text transmission they largely abandoned at the dawn of the printed age. In so doing, they take on a much more explicit role of producing and shaping the digital cultural heritage (CH) in addition to its accustomed role of preserving it and making it available. In this paper, we will discuss the practices of digitization within the library institutional setting, and in particular, the national library setting