Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper "morgues" and rarely saw the dusty light of day.
Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online -- an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you're someone who was actually in the news.
In a recent survey (PDF) of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to "unpublish" information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online.
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On a much broader scale, "unpublishing" is the wholesale loss of content that can occur when an online journal or Web archive is sold or goes bankrupt, or the software needed to read it becomes obsolete. It's expensive to transfer records from an old server to a newer, faster version that operates with different formats and programs. A floppy disk has a half-life of about five years.
"It's not clear who's responsible to archive digital material," said Stanley Katz, director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. "Some of the stuff's going to go away altogether. We are likely to lose whole subsets of it. If we keep renewing everything, we can keep it going. But the question is whether there is money and commitment enough to keep it going. The odds are that money will be applied selectively. "
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