Not many people remember Arthur Constance. A Canadian, he came to England in the 1920s to run his father's business in Cheltenham and stayed on to make a second career as a journalist. I first learned of Constance's legendary collection in the mid-1980s and he had died by the time I traced him. The greater blow was learning that his Fortean clippings and books had, just a couple of weeks previously, been dissipated as his family wanted to emigrate and could not store them. Along the way, Steve Moore, Ian Simmons, Paul Sieveking and Andrew Dennis have joined me to form the initial group that is launching this initiative.
Information tends to be volatile unless recorded.
Personal narratives and observations are gathered by individual researchers almost by chance. Many newspapers do not maintain their back-issue files beyond a few years. Large modern newspapers are converting to electronic and optical archiving, but only data that they deem to be of interest is stored. Archives of older newspapers are few, incomplete and difficult to access. The archiving of periodicals is even more patchy, apart from scientific periodicals and those titles mandated for deposit to the five national libraries.