Digital preservation and newspaper archives
Victoria McCargar, Associate Technology Editor of the Los Angeles Times has written an article on newspaper archives and digital preservation. It's currently available for free/without subscription. There's also a PDF version of the entire issue.
Research on a global scale is under way to find solutions to preserving born-digital content, but it's a field limited almost exclusively to academic and research libraries, national archives and bureaucratic record keepers - professionals invested with a defined responsibility to keep digital files alive and accessible for a long time.So it is ironic that even as they're publishing stories about data fragility, newspapers haven't quite made the connection with what is going on in their own electronic morgues. (I refer throughout to newspaper archives, but in fact the same issues affect other news media collections as well - for that matter, any data collection that is supposed to last indefinitely.)
The fact is, photo and multimedia databases, and even text databases are potentially shorter-lived than yellowing newsprint, and some formats in use today will ultimately prove more unstable than chemical color photography. Indeed, the very technologies that have enabled the rapid dissemination of news are conspiring to create a generation-size gap in the historic record.