It sounds like you may be more familiar with that effort than I am. In my interactions with SI (and others like NARA), my takeaway is that these people are ridiculously smart. We try to be helpful cloud experts where formats and access patterns are concerned, but we start with the assumption that the people coming to us wanting to share data are the experts in their data. From my vantage point, SI seems pretty smart :-)
Curious, because I know Dr. Clough went to there after his stint at Georgia Tech. Would love to read the story of how digitization was implemented: that's a big ship to turn! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Wayne_Clough#Secretary_of_t...