Fergus, On Tuesday 22 November 2005 01:17, Fergus Wilde wrote:
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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