This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum.
I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to.
It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.
/rant
I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm.
> I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.
That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.
Here in Australia I once saw a community choir shut down over the combination of copyright and public liability. I haven't seen a second choir so I don't know how common that is.
While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.
Libraries are under continual space pressure. Books come in, the buildings stay the same size. Thus, "weeding."
And of course libraries have succumbed to a kind of identity panic, "Who are we in the Age of Google?" Everything is online, so ... let's just pitch this stuff to make room.
Make room for what? Again the identity panic: maybe we are a community center, so let's set aside space for this and that and the other thing, which is still more pressure on the extant catalog.
And so those big shelves of microfilm just sit there, haven't been looked at in ages, might as well pitch 'em. It's all online now. Now. Maybe not later.
I worked in an academic library for a long time. These problems are endemic.
It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.
I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control.
It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste.
Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.
What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...).
But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there.
The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.
It takes a lot more space than bits on a hard drive. I am curious though why libraries didn't have their microfilm digitized before getting rid of it. Maybe a case of thinking "well it must be online somewhere" and that's what everyone thought...
I'm not confident in this, but: if microfilm/fiche is anything like ordinary film, it's somewhat annoying and costly to archive: the film itself physically degrades ("vinegar syndrome"[1]) and might be hazardous to store in bulk (depending on the age and type of film stock).
(This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.)
It’s one thing to keep a single copy for all of society locked up in a box. But having it retrievable means staff, and maybe in a bunch of places if you want local access.
In Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments.
"Business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments" is exactly what I would want from local news.
However my local news basically consists of reporting what crimes happened in my area (republishing the police's press reports) and the results of my local handball club I don't care about. No wonder I don't read my local news.
> In Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments.
There's a similar free paper in my (suburban) area. They also include pretty thorough news about the local school districts: https://adamspg.com.
I don't know how well they're doing through, since they every once in a while send solicitations for donations to fund their operations (and I think they're a for-profit).
There has been a kerfuffle in the Australian National Library over continuance of funding for digitisation of the records.
Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done. Firstly, all data digital or mechanical or physical demands maintenance, Secondly, it's never done, as more materials always arise requiring archival assessment and inclusion.
> Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done.
That was the mindset back in the 00's - just put everything on a cd or hdd and it'll be there forever, then you can get rid of the bulky source material. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. lost backups, ransomware, incompatible media files....
… Low resolution scans using older image processing technology… black and white only scans of photocopies… shakes fist at several publicly accessible US government department archives
This reminds me of the old articles I ran into at some point from the 80s and maybe early 90s where the writers talked about how many floors from a library you could fit on a hard drive or a floppy disk or a maybe a cd. Of course, that’s just text…
I'm an investor. To make that work, I'm not a historian, but a current-ian.
I avoid news like the plague - all narrative, all emotion, all written by English majors, not subject-matter experts. If a current-ian has to avoid the news, what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?
Future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news. They would be better served by databases that have lists of facts about current times in simple data formats. Stats, voting records, laws, commodity prices, demographics, weather data, boring (but low-key fascinating) things like that.
Historians need both those things. The hard facts on weather data, commodity prices, and voting records say exactly what was happening, but they can't tell a historian why it happened. The reasons behind voting records are inherently emotional, subjective, messy things which can't be boiled down to a series of hard facts.
Those reasons are also the important bit of history, because they're what allow us to (hopefully, we're not doing a great job of it lately) avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did.
I'm sorry, have you ever spoken to a historian? Are you under the impression that they study the past by finding "unemotional" texts written by subjects matter experts about the current affairs of their day? What era do you think was full of these "dispassionate recordings of facts" for historians to peruse? What decade do you think local newspapers stopped being peer-reviewed journals?
Also, how do you plan to make investment decisions without considering emotion? Are you betting on perfectly efficient markets?
Where do I say newspapers have ever been good, or that historians do in fact study dry facts?
I'm saying newspapers are fundamentally incapable of giving unbiased and useful data that broader society can rely on. If you want a daily dose of outrage, perfect. If you want actionable information, look elsewhere.
> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?
Expanding on that thought: What hope do we have of understanding history a hundred years or longer ago? Right now today, with a huge amount of true information available for anybody who takes time to look a little, almost everybody around us is 100% propagandized and will believe the opposite tomorrow of what they believed yesterday if the TV tells them to.
Taking history as it is "taught" as any truth value is ridiculous, since we know that the rulers of each age have used history mostly as a tool for their own political goals. Even today, it is quite apparent that most historians go into the profession as political activists primarily and researchers secondarily, often having decided first what they want to "discover".
Not that I would call Wikipedia the epicenter of truth, but...
> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time
It could be really insightful if it's possible to see how a specific wikipedia article evolved on an annual basis over the past 100 years, assuming it's still around.
E.g. for the most political topics, like "abortion", I imagine an annual snapshot and comparing the page between years/eras would provide a lot of historical insight on how "truth" shifts year to year.
In this universe, who will do things like uncover the Watergate scandal (originally Washington Post) or the Theranos scandal (Wall St Journal collaborating with a whistleblower)? Journalism is much more than a ticker tape of data or clickbait headlines.
Listen to the podcast The Past Times (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZpxxEwKUI). Newspapers were fucking insane, ridiculous, just bizarrely biased and terribly organized. But they did record how, like, judges and lawyers would regularly get shitfaced in a pub and decide cases until 3 in the morning. So maybe it's more useful than we think.
As an aside, when I was in high school in the late 80s/early 90s, microfiche was heavily pushed by the school/teachers/librarians as the information medium of the future. There was a tremendous amount of information stored on microfiche, and it would be an absolute travesty if this was lost.
Printed has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc. The unknown is how much of that data will be accessible, say, 100 years from now.
Except there isn't much to begin with, and what's there is very selective, it isn't continuous, it is hidden in a gigantic pile of muck, and it isn't verified, nor written in an accessible way. Civil journalism doesn't exist at the correct scale and organization required, and never will. That was one of those ridiculous internet pipe dreams.
National news is also diminishing. There's considerably less hard news, and more touchy-feely background stories.
> Printed has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc.
Unlike print media, internet sites are not required to submit their material to Library of Congress or similar government-run archives all over the world that have requirements on archival, durability and whatnot. Twitter used to have a firehose feed to LoC but IIRC it got discontinued years ago.
And that doesn't even touch the question of integrity - it's hard enough to vet actual local news sources if they're authentic (there was a scandal some years ago about a lot of "content mills" from the Balkans), and outright impossible with local bloggers, Nextdoor or whatever.
I would argue that the problem goes much deeper than for historians. By focusing on the most FUDed national/international news all day, people are collectively incensed all day long for no reason. Doesn’t matter that it won’t affect their daily lives, but they are forced to read it by having it shoved in their face…
There's a magic red button with a cross at the top right or top left of every screen that can make the disappear into thin air. Nobody is forced to read anything.
Readit News
I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to.
It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.
/rant
I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm.
rant/
That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.
Some random guy bought the domain years ago and didn’t have anything he wanted to do with it so he just redirected to Gruber’s site.
The only evidence I can find of it now is here:
https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com
While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.
And of course libraries have succumbed to a kind of identity panic, "Who are we in the Age of Google?" Everything is online, so ... let's just pitch this stuff to make room.
Make room for what? Again the identity panic: maybe we are a community center, so let's set aside space for this and that and the other thing, which is still more pressure on the extant catalog.
And so those big shelves of microfilm just sit there, haven't been looked at in ages, might as well pitch 'em. It's all online now. Now. Maybe not later.
I worked in an academic library for a long time. These problems are endemic.
"Where it's easy for someone to edit. Do you by chance, have a copy of 1984 I can check out?"
I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control.
It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste.
Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.
But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there.
The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.
Name suggestion: Hist-Hub
Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.
(This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a...
Deleted Comment
https://communityimpact.com/
They’re doing very well and are popular.
However my local news basically consists of reporting what crimes happened in my area (republishing the police's press reports) and the results of my local handball club I don't care about. No wonder I don't read my local news.
There's a similar free paper in my (suburban) area. They also include pretty thorough news about the local school districts: https://adamspg.com.
I don't know how well they're doing through, since they every once in a while send solicitations for donations to fund their operations (and I think they're a for-profit).
Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done. Firstly, all data digital or mechanical or physical demands maintenance, Secondly, it's never done, as more materials always arise requiring archival assessment and inclusion.
That was the mindset back in the 00's - just put everything on a cd or hdd and it'll be there forever, then you can get rid of the bulky source material. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. lost backups, ransomware, incompatible media files....
I avoid news like the plague - all narrative, all emotion, all written by English majors, not subject-matter experts. If a current-ian has to avoid the news, what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?
Future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news. They would be better served by databases that have lists of facts about current times in simple data formats. Stats, voting records, laws, commodity prices, demographics, weather data, boring (but low-key fascinating) things like that.
Those reasons are also the important bit of history, because they're what allow us to (hopefully, we're not doing a great job of it lately) avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did.
Also, how do you plan to make investment decisions without considering emotion? Are you betting on perfectly efficient markets?
I'm saying newspapers are fundamentally incapable of giving unbiased and useful data that broader society can rely on. If you want a daily dose of outrage, perfect. If you want actionable information, look elsewhere.
Expanding on that thought: What hope do we have of understanding history a hundred years or longer ago? Right now today, with a huge amount of true information available for anybody who takes time to look a little, almost everybody around us is 100% propagandized and will believe the opposite tomorrow of what they believed yesterday if the TV tells them to.
Taking history as it is "taught" as any truth value is ridiculous, since we know that the rulers of each age have used history mostly as a tool for their own political goals. Even today, it is quite apparent that most historians go into the profession as political activists primarily and researchers secondarily, often having decided first what they want to "discover".
> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time
It could be really insightful if it's possible to see how a specific wikipedia article evolved on an annual basis over the past 100 years, assuming it's still around.
E.g. for the most political topics, like "abortion", I imagine an annual snapshot and comparing the page between years/eras would provide a lot of historical insight on how "truth" shifts year to year.
Deleted Comment
Now they don’t even try.
That’s what people are complaining about.
National news is also diminishing. There's considerably less hard news, and more touchy-feely background stories.
Unlike print media, internet sites are not required to submit their material to Library of Congress or similar government-run archives all over the world that have requirements on archival, durability and whatnot. Twitter used to have a firehose feed to LoC but IIRC it got discontinued years ago.
And that doesn't even touch the question of integrity - it's hard enough to vet actual local news sources if they're authentic (there was a scandal some years ago about a lot of "content mills" from the Balkans), and outright impossible with local bloggers, Nextdoor or whatever.