Who Wants Yesterday’s Papers?: Essays on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital Age

Should librarians try to save everything that is published? If so, in what formats? How can the records of human experience be best preserved in a time of limited resources? These are just a few of the controversial questions addressed in this volume, which distills the essential issues from the proceedings of a conference held by notable scholars and librarians at the University of Maryland Libraries in March 2002. The conference organizers, editors of this book, were originally prompted by Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, which indicted librarians for creating microfilm instead of saving newspapers and other printed artifacts in original format. One man’s complaint has grown into four University of Maryland professors discussing the materials used in their disciplines and an equal number of essays on various aspects of preservation of both printed and digital artifacts. This volume will interest anyone concerned with the preservation of the record of human experience.