On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The archive of Cologne was a state of the art archive in Germany. If anything it was the kind of institution that people would donate collections to because of its excellent reputation and practices. A similar story happened to an archive in Theresienstadt if I remember well. Cologne collapsed because of an accident with an underground that was dug, Theresienstadt saw its collection disappear in flames.
We are not an archive. But our best efforts help safeguard against the total loss of an archive. We can be complementary to what our partners do. We should not think so insular.
If they do not have proper archival practices (i.e. redundancy/tape backup), we should tell them about Internet Archive.
It is insular to think we need to be the solution for problems we are not well prepared to solve.
-- John Vandenberg