Among the written heritage public or private institutions are likely to receive, the archives of contemporary writers are by their original diversity and length, a challenge for those who are willing to receive and keep them to make them available. The archives and manuscripts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries writers attest of the big technological changes of our times: from the written pages bound by hand to the mass-produced notebooks such as “Moleskin”, from quills to biros, from typewriters to computers. Today, all these pieces of evidence from a pre-digital era keep our institutions and research teams quite busy. They toil to convert them into digital data by means of two main processes: digitalising them on the one hand, and typing and broadcasting their metadata on the other hand. The resulting sizeable data bank of these literary archives forces us –researchers- to question how data must be built, used and how we need to organise our research. Based on our experience on some archives –mainly archives of Hispanic intellectuals- and on early results among other research programs.