We use these methods at the University of Iowa Libraries. Such actions will free us to pursue all agendas for archival automation and surrogate copy delivery. They will also direct our services to the preservation of a vital, continuing interaction of orignals and copies. A hundred years ago, some of the great newspapers published a million copies a day. This is an unbelievable state of rarity for something that whole cities bought and read every day.
More people read the paper than anything else.
So, I'm saying that libraries, if they have a run of one of those great papers, ought to keep it, period. We have to learn from that recent example now, as we begin another fearsomely expensive phase of making digital pictures of the pages of books, and build into the copying process a prohibition on guillotining and a requirement for the safe storage of all source originals. I leave that to you to decide. Since we have it on the shelf now, we know it's physically possible to keep it. Nothing is inevitable.