[mfragin]

This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum.

I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to.

It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.

/rant

I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm.

rant/

[tivert]

> I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.

That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.

[scarface74]

Random: For the longest, newspaper.com (no “s”) redirected to daringfireball.com. It wasn’t Gruber (the site owner) astroturfing.

Some random guy bought the domain years ago and didn’t have anything he wanted to do with it so he just redirected to Gruber’s site.

The only evidence I can find of it now is here:

https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com

[roenxi]

Here in Australia I once saw a community choir shut down over the combination of copyright and public liability. I haven't seen a second choir so I don't know how common that is.

While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.

[tivert]

> While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.

At least in the US, there's a very longstanding practice of local libraries maintaining newspaper archives (as bound volumes* or microfiche/microfilm). I'd be super-super surprised if there was any legal issue to doing that.

* For pop-culture example, see Back to the Future 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfmdW3hiu8w.

[roenxi]

I was also surprised. Australia has a long tradition to community choirs. Most cultures do, in fact.

If people are destroying the last copy of something, copyright was probably involved. That is what copyright does; stops people creating copies of things. Otherwise there'll be some eccentric acting as an archivist - look how hard the content creators have to fight to stop their work being publicly recorded on the internet. The system is designed to stop the sort of people who do that, which absolutely includes library archivists. They'll be in the crosshairs of some lobbyist.

[tivert]

> If people are destroying the last copy of something, copyright was probably involved.

I think you're trying to inject a copyright angle without any kind of evidence it's significant in this scenario. And it doesn't apply: https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/copyright/libraries.

I think (at least when it comes to public libraries), there are also other factors at play. For instance: a frequent self-understanding that they're not an archive (which is only somewhat true), and a motivation to "serve their customers" by focusing on "popular" services, and a misunderstanding of what the internet is.

[roenxi]

And yet, by the magic of there being only one way it could happen, the day that someone destroys the last copy of the microfilm will be because copyright prevented the people who wanted from keeping a copy from doing so.

It isn't like there is any shortage of people thinking that sort of record is worth preserving. Lots of people do. There is a shortage of people legally aloud to make copies. Because, as mentioned, copyright.

[bombcar]

Music licensing is an absolute bitch, which is why many MANY church choirs all sing from the same book, because that book has been vetted and they have performance licenses.

The other option is to only sing music from before the turn of the last century.

[maxwell]

At least the law isn't the law in the U.S., it defers to the Constitution, and that in turn to the sovereign (the People).

[tialaramex]

This would be the US Constitution as interpreted by a half dozen corrupt weirdos who were selected for their partisan bona fides and can't be dismissed for any reason, right?

[maxwell]

Propose an amendment.

[tialaramex]

An amendment to the constitution ... that will just be disregarded by those same people?

Also, I'm an old man, no amendments written after I was born have passed.

[krapp]

Try asserting your sovereignty over the laws of the land in a courtroom and see what happens.

[maxwell]

Jury nullification?

[at_a_remove]

Libraries are under continual space pressure. Books come in, the buildings stay the same size. Thus, "weeding."

And of course libraries have succumbed to a kind of identity panic, "Who are we in the Age of Google?" Everything is online, so ... let's just pitch this stuff to make room.

Make room for what? Again the identity panic: maybe we are a community center, so let's set aside space for this and that and the other thing, which is still more pressure on the extant catalog.

And so those big shelves of microfilm just sit there, haven't been looked at in ages, might as well pitch 'em. It's all online now. Now. Maybe not later.

I worked in an academic library for a long time. These problems are endemic.

[rationalist]

> you can just get that on the internet now

"Where it's easy for someone to edit. Do you by chance, have a copy of 1984 I can check out?"

[AlecSchueler]

People are already doing that every day.

[kristopolous]

It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.

I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control.

It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste.

Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.

[grumbel]

What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...).

But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there.

The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.

[jraph]

> It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.

Name suggestion: Hist-Hub

[miah_]

Or maybe archive.org..

[xg15]

Or maybe more like a SciHub/LibGen for historians.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> rats nest of legal issues

Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.

[zokier]

Storing and offering copies are two very different things

[Psyladine]

Storing it without availability is the same as it not existing.

[TheCoelacanth]

Who's going to bother archiving something if they can't share it with someone for nearly a century, though?

[abracadaniel]

That’s particularly frustrating since the point of microfilm is that it takes nearly no space to store it, and thus nearly no cost to keep it forever.

[SoftTalker]

It takes a lot more space than bits on a hard drive. I am curious though why libraries didn't have their microfilm digitized before getting rid of it. Maybe a case of thinking "well it must be online somewhere" and that's what everyone thought...

[Mistletoe]

As I surf more and more of the old internet and broken links though, I’m realizing how precious that microfiche and film is.

I assume we are about to get a big lesson in this with Imgur removing all nsfw images and images uploaded without a user account.

I’m realizing the web isn’t a static thing at all, it’s just some wriggling ever-evolving snake we are experiencing and riding and watching the tail disappear and a new head born continuously. “You can’t step your foot in the same internet twice.”

I miss microfiche.

[knaik94]

The internet is big enough and has been around for long enough where both complete loss and complete preservation exists. I am young enough to where I "discovered" the existance of news groups within the last year. More accurately, I discovered the google groups frontend to newsgroups. It's fascinating seeing discussions about things I find interesting from before I was born. Someone has cataloged and uploaded various K-mart, a now bankrupt retail chain, in-store tapes to archive.org . There's traing videos and tapes, and reel to reels going all the way back to 1947. I enjoy listening to the christmas mixes. The internet is not static, but with proper management and motivations, data will stay forever. My local library had a microfiche machine that they took out last year, I wish I got to try it before they did but for the last few years, there was a "out of order" sign on it. It wasn't really out of order, they just didn't want people to touch it.

On the other hand, myspace profiles and Cartoon Network shows are already good examples of losing data. Cartoon Network is especially unfortunate because some of the shows weren't ripped, so illegitimate sources won't help you obtain them. The creators of other shows publicly tweeted how they had to pirate their own show for their kids, because it wasn't available to stream.

I believe the internet is good, but I have also been realizing that I made bad assumptions about how companies will handle data.

https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1990

[xg15]

I mean, big media companies (e.g. Disney or Nintendo) specifically seem to believe that copyright should give them the right to basically rewrite their own history however they please - e.g. by "un-publishing" old movies or shows when they would conflict with a planned re-release of the same franchise.

That's a desire that IMO directly conflicts with society's desire to keep history. So as long as we have powerful groups that specifically want the ability to erase parts of history, historians will have a bad time.

[acuozzo]

> I am young enough to where I "discovered" the existance of news groups within the last year.

I am sorry to report to you that even chunks of Usenet are missing. Specifically, significant chunks between the UTzoo archive and DejaNews are just... gone? There are posts, for instance, to alt.video.laserdisc to which I can find only replies and not the OP.

[ghaff]

Usenet was never completely saved. https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ (And it's in relatively good shape compared to BBS messages, the vast bulk of which are long gone.) And who knows what has been lost since Dejanews given that Google did its usual lost interest in thing.

[Mistletoe]

Thank you for posting the Kmart tape. I pressed play and I thought it wasn't working and hopped in the shower. Then it started playing and I was awash with Nostalgia and I was in Kmart at Christmas in 1990 again. Thank you.

[the_af]

There are Cartoon Network shows that got lost forever? Wow, that's sad.

[johnchristopher]

Most likely a reference to https://www.resetera.com/threads/final-space-becoming-a-wbd-... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912

[brazzy]

Most certainly a case of "ain't got no money for that".

Digitizing large archives is pretty labor intensive, plus you need to get specialized hardware and software. All that for stuff only a small minority of people care about, and while funding is getting reduced...

[plumeria]

There's a whole "deep web" of historical knowledge trapped within microfilmed records and even in undigitized media.

[ghaff]

It costs money to digitize.

As someone who has been involved in digitizing a college newspaper in the past, it takes quite a bit of effort and well >$10K even with a lot of volunteer labor. (Which may not sound like a lot of money but actually is for a volunteer organization in many cases.) And it's not just digitizing. It's having enough metadata that the result is useful to anyone other than the hardest core historian.

[woodruffw]

I'm not confident in this, but: if microfilm/fiche is anything like ordinary film, it's somewhat annoying and costly to archive: the film itself physically degrades ("vinegar syndrome"[1]) and might be hazardous to store in bulk (depending on the age and type of film stock).

(This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a...

[Scaevolus]

Microfilm doesn't use cellulose acetate, and is stable for centuries with minor storage requirements (room temperature, low humidity)-- the same that are required by books.

[woodruffw]

Modern microfilm doesn't; what about the kind that's holding newspaper archives from the 1920s?

[dredmorbius]

It seems that cellulose nitrate film stock was phased out by the 1950s:

<https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6...>

How widely it was used prior to that time, and what filmstock selection practices specific institutions followed I don't know, though I suspect these may have varied.

As for current polyester filmstock:

Black-and-white polyester film has a life expectancy of 500+ years under proper storage conditions.

(From the same source.)

[travisjungroth]

It’s one thing to keep a single copy for all of society locked up in a box. But having it retrievable means staff, and maybe in a bunch of places if you want local access.

[zokier]

What legal issues exactly does library having microfilms involve?