The importance and practicality of making antiquated and obscure taxonomic literature openly accessible in digital format is examined. The difficulty of acquisition of appropriate literature is frequently overlooked as a formidable obstacle to the progress of taxonomic and biodiversity studies. This problem can be rectified easily and with little cost by a devoted group of collaborators. The required elements for accomplishing this task are simple: a flatbed scanner, a program for processing the scans, and .pdf document creation software. Although the task may at first appear herculean, it has a definite and attainable end-point. A finite amount of relevant literature exists, in contrast to the apparently limitless number of undescribed taxa that taxonomists also face. Because of the authors’ specialty, beetles were selected as the exemplar taxon and a cost-benefit analysis was performed to determine the feasibility of the solution proposed herein.