John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in
Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Regarding digitalization: That's the responsibility of the national library of origin of those newspapers. And most of them already are digitalized or are in the process or queued for it.
If those newspapers are the usual suspects I would expect in a Norwegian archive such as Svenska Dagbladet, Berlingske Tidende, Politiken, London Times, Le Monde, El Mundo, New York Times and Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Prawda, and so on, I would assume that all of them are available online and why should a Norwegian university spend time and money to create another copy?
Digitalization and online archives allow that not every research library in the world has to do the same job again and again.
Ciao Henning