[redwall_hp]

Exactly. Libraries have kept microfiche archives of newspapers for forever, and they're an essential part of historical research.

They also preserved old books. But now I guess they're becoming middlemen for access to limited ebook platforms that ensure books disappear when publishers lose interest.

The "Information Age" is proving to be the setup for a dark age, when nonprofitable things are just thrown out and efforts to preserve them are actively fought.

[layman51]

I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.