You’re spot on with this. I recently converted a local history book from 1911 to Markdown, ePub and HTML and tracked the changes on GitHub. Only a handful of copies of this book exist in physical form and it has been photo copied (which is great).

However, I was completely shot down by the local library when I was discussing it with them. They said they already had a photo copy and didn’t need anymore digital editions, I tried to explain the benefits of having it in a machine readable format but they wouldn’t entertain it. I completed the project for me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but thought they might have been interested in archiving it but they weren’t.

My general feeling is that they didn’t like an outsider contributing and touching on a format they didn’t know so got slightly defensive.