On 10/14/2011 9:17 PM, foundation-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

However archiving is rather different from what we are dealing with which is more focused on books and other mass market material rather than say old planning application maps and minutes of the union of postal workers 1937.

Exactly so. Old mass market material tends to be thrown out when it gets wet, dusty or is in the way, torn up to line drawers, and otherwise casually treated. It is just this sort of treatment that makes a very old mass market work valuable - as it may be the only surviving copy of a large production run.

In my family they've tended to regard 100 year old school textbooks as having high value. But what of a 100 year old newspaper? Unless it was of direct concern it is long gone. Newspapers come and go. If that newspaper or the local library kept archival copies they will be on microfilm by now.

You'd think that a newspaper morgue would still have original photographs or negatives of events less than 50 years old - but that is rarely the case. Unless something at the time of creation was flagged as having special value it might be thrown out within the year. So (for example) a photo of Sargent Schriver taken in 1954 when he was a member of the Chicago Board of Education might have been published in a local newspaper - but the original negative destroyed within a year or two. Therefore that newspaper could not republish that same photo several years later when he became the first director of the Peace Corps in 1961, much less in his obituary this year (unless they extracted it from the microfilm copy of the published paper).

Going forward, this sort of information will potentially have a longer life as digital data storage contains more and more recent history, but the gatekeepers and preservationists will control access to much of that material. A website I helped create in 1995 was captured by the IA in 1996 (and many times since), but that first capture has already been destroyed due to a backup failure.