Newspapers would have to be printed on acid-free paper for him to reconsider the policy, he added. As for Baker's book, Billington has not read it. Billington said that the Library of Congress was leading the way on treating books chemically to remove the acid from their paper, a process that he said adds 300 to 500 years to their shelf life. A third of a million books have been treated. Many Web sites are already gone forever, including some from the 1996 presidential election and some concerned with the Y2K problem, he said.
Some scholars argue that even more high-level attention is needed.
Robert Darnton, a Princeton University historian whose own work on the reading habits of 18th-century France was made more difficult because of the destruction of chapbooks and broadsides of the period, proposes that Laura Bush, a librarian herself, use her new role as first lady to take up the cause of preservation. Use of this Web site is subject to certain Terms and Conditions . We may collect personal information on this site, as described in our Privacy Policy . The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.