A mandate to preserve – Assessing the inaugural Newspaper Archive Summit

A mandate to preserve – Assessing the inaugural Newspaper Archive Summit, by Victoria McCargar

  • “Historically, when a newspaper ceased publication, the photographs, clippings and bound volumes were handed off to the local historical society or public library. They sat there, and many continue to sit there, until the organization decided what to do with them. While newspapers have been around for centuries, they weren’t considered worthy of preservation and indexing until the late 19th Century. Today, newspapers are largely digital. Their content is multimedia, and there is a dwindling presence of the physical edition as news moves online. Unfortunately, this revolution in newsgathering has made obsolete the tried‐and‐true archives methods (known as benign neglect), and along with them the old handoff paradigm. Instead, historical societies and libraries are struggling to deal with this new digital content and how it will be preserved for future generations. The fact that digital archives are much more fragile than paper ones is a problem of which many publishers are completely unaware.”
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