Interesting article:
Preserving news in the digital environment: Mapping the newspaper industry in transition
http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/LCreport_final.pdf
Personally, I would be willing to pay taxes to help the Library of Congress archive regional and national newspapers. Students in elementary school on up through life-long learners tap the stories for their value in revealing who we are as a people as well as how something started and why - which helps people be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
A while back I was researching the case brought by Louise Cobell against the U.S. government on behalf of the Blackfeet Nation and other Native American Nations. It focused on land-grabs by the U.S. government of property given to Native Americans. It was a swindle, something later proven in court and a considerable sum of taxpayer dollars went to compensate for the corruption revealed.
I was able to see how something like that could happen by digging into the Library of Congress' microfilm archive of newspapers between the 1860s on up to the present. The records represented thoughts from one end of the country to the other and everything in between.
That kind of archive helps us be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Allocating taxes for this noble purpose serves more than money can buy. It's not like paying taxes to provide four security guards, two cars and a chauffeur for outgoing Mayor Ritchie Daley in Chicago for the rest of his life.
Friday, May 13, 2011
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The article from the respected Center for Research Libraries is very technical and seeks to identify the "archivable form" of news within the production workflows of modern news organizations. This is an important first step in identifying "how" to do this work, but what continues to be unknown is the "who". Many news organizations have pay for access archives, but it's not clear if that is a sustainable model for long term preservation. LOC often comes to the rescue on these kinds of challenges, but taxpayer dollars for cultural preservation are an endangered species these days!
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