Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Fergus,

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 01:17, Fergus Wilde wrote:
> ...
>
> Various highly misguided schemes, such as 'transferring' books and
> periodicals to microfilm, trashing the originals to save space, have
> already come horribly unstuck as 'disposable' 19th century newspapers
> prove time and again that they last a great deal better than the
> surrogate media intended to replace them. Nicholson Baker has written
> an excellent book on this theme, 'Double Fold: libraries and the
> assault on paper', 2002. Check it out for some very interesting
> findings on serious data longevity.

A library is not a museum. Libraries are there to get information 
materials into the hands of people in the way that suits their needs 
best, not to preserve antiquities.

As I said, I love books, too, but Nicholson Baker is so agog over his 
beloved newspapers that he sees them as treasures to be preserved, not 
records of their times to be made accessible to the public. His is an 
antiquarian agenda, not a public information agenda. I'm not 
necessarily saying fiche or film is (or was) the right solution to the 
challenge of archival storage for newspapers, but neither do I believe 
that paper is the apex of information recording and distribution media.


Randall Schulz