[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

[Henning Schlottmann]

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