[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

[John at Darkstar]

It is not that people, and researchers, don't want access to the
newspapers, they are not allowed to access them. Even a doctorand that
wanted to get access to them to do a study on some of the letters
written by Henrik Ibsen was refused to get access, because as they said,
"the newspapers are in the store".

Due to restructuring of the norwegian military a lot of space are freed
up in the old military compounds. It seems rather special that there are
a lot of state-owned storage space nearby and at the same time the
university claims they don't have enough storage area.

John

Andrew Gray skrev:
> 2008/9/25 Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>:
>> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
>>>
>>> 1. Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
>>> http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a
>>> substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
>> This is probably true (I've never read that book, but the statement
>> makes sense), but given the option between digitization and burning,
>> or just straight burning, the former is the more attractive. I still
>> can't get my mind around the fact that burning the papers is the first
>> and preferred option here.
> 
> It's not so much the preferred option - I doubt they actually *want*
> to do it - as the only practical option.
> 
> If you have no institution willing to take them off your hands, then
> you can either continue to spend resources on storing a collection
> no-one wants, or you can free up the space and do something useful
> with it. Digitisation will free up the space eventually (since you can
> junk them afterwards), but it's expensive - who's going to pay for it?
> Will the library have to store them for the next five years whilst
> they're digitised? Who takes on the ongoing costs of maintaining the
> digital archive?
> 
> It's a truism in the library world that the only time anyone makes a
> noise about caring about a book is when you try to get rid of it. This
> seems to be a classic example.
> 
> If you want these resources to be preserved, we need to *use them*.
> Make a point of saying how good it is we have these collections. Find
> interesting uses for them. Do research, do transcriptions, discuss
> digitising or opening collections which are currently in storage. This
> approach, more than anything else, will ensure they get valued; and if
> they're valued, they're kept.
> 
> Only expressing interest when they're going for the skip is perhaps
> too late to be of any real use.
>