Historical Big Data has posed a problem for successive national administrations, and while digitization has played an important role in ensuring the survival of invaluable social history artefacts, it has created a multitude of new problems. Digitization became the panacea for archival access over the past 50 years and it served the immediate purpose of taking fragile cultural artefacts out of the ‘handling environment’. With rapid advances in technology over the past 20 years concerns have now shifted to the conservation and preservation of these digital archives. The life cycle of digitization has moved from the simple concept of preservation standard digital duplicate to more complex workflow processes enabling migration and access. In this paper we discuss some of the legacy issues that digitization has created and how meaningful collaborations between historical and computer scientists can yield exciting solutions to complicated research problems.