And the situation is worse than you probably think. I compared articles in the commercial electronic archives, such as Lexis-Nexis or DataTimes, of four newspapers to the paper versions from their national and local fronts on arbitrarily chosen dates. Not one archived version flawlessly matched newsprint. The errors ranged from incorrect punctuation to incorrect headlines and bylines. There were also more substantial errors.
Some problems involve elementary typography, but they can create dangerous misimpressions.
In the Tennessean 's archive, for example, parentheses around explanatory information in quotations were missing, dangerously attributing words that had never been spoken. The parentheses presumably were lost in sloppy computer translation. In some cases, errors were introduced in archives when information had to be retyped, rather than copied and pasted from existing files. Archival quality control is a never-ending task that extends beyond the newsroom. Chamberlain kept newsroom librarians informed as she worked through the problem so that papers with similar software could benefit from her findings.