Against the backdrop of his work on Arabic periodicals from the late nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean, Till Grallert will challenge the equation of "digitisation = access" by outlining the layers of inaccessibility inherent to existing digitisation efforts and infrastructures concentrated, for a large part, in the Global North (Grallert 2022, Risam 2018, 2019). These are a) a knowledge gap regarding the material artefacts themselves; b) a digitisation bias rooted in collection and survival biases and the direct costs of digitisation; c) the hegemony of socio-technical infrastructures rooted in Anglo-American neoliberal capitalism and the Western cultural canon (cf. Piron 2018); d) insufficient computational tools for layout and optical character recognition (cf. Wrisley et al. forthcoming); and e) insufficient access to basic digital infrastructures and utilities (cf. Aiyegbusi 2019).