When it comes to books, are we keeping the originals? Barely:
A prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, forever. It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization. They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we’l realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.
One big problem, this archive is only in California. It needs redundancy and hopefully, this can be done in the south, north east and mid-west as well as in overseas locations. Maybe a consortium of the library of congress, museums, local libraries and non-profits? The other question, what happened to newspapers on rolls of microfiche that was available at libraries around the country? Google has stopped scanning in microfiche archives and much more is on microfiche than newspapers (including public records) .