In a comment rosemary95 stated that there are thousands of fragmentary classical authors and their fragments but that most of there of the fragments are littered throughout old scrolls (ancient and medieval)? A)Why in most disciplines is there not a policy that you don't automatically digitize discovered artifacts , manuscripts and inscriptions? B) Why hasn't there been a huge archive of classical texts for both scholars and the lay public?
Just money I'm afraid. I do not know what it costs to digitize fragile classical materials, but to digitize your standard 20th or 19th century paper materials in an archives costs about $35/hr minimum (including labor and equipment), that's the estimate we use. I'm in the Midwest, land of the free and home of low costs of living, so I imagine if you get out East or West it gets higher. For papyrus etc. I'd hazard a guess of $100/hr, because you'd have to hire very skilled workers (for just handling modern paper you can hire undergrad or graduate students) and have more specialized equipment to photograph the materials.
For putting it online, you need more money. Thursday I sat in on a meeting with a vendor that runs one of the major content searching/management platforms for newspapers (Veridian), after digitization on our end, for them to ingest a newspaper collection they quoted 15 cents a page, extra to the existing agreement. Then you have hosting costs on top of that. Starts to add up.
So really, no one has a moral opposition to putting the whole of human history online, it's just expensive, and therefore takes time.
To underline the point about money made by /u/caffarelli, the Vatican is making a heavy investment in digitization. The costs are staggering:
The entire undertaking is expected to take at least 15 years and cost more than $63 million dollars
Source article. Here's another article on the process. It says that:
Digitizing the Vatican's 40 million pages of library archives will take 50 experts, five scanners and many, many years before the process comes to a close.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and has around 82,000 manuscripts...
There's no set timeframe for how long the process will last. If it takes four years for every 3,000 manuscripts, the the entire library may not be online for over 109 years. The documents are expected to consume 43 quadrillion bytes of storage space
While the costs are incredible, thankfully the results are too. You can see a selection of them here.