Following on from our recent piece about the joy of reading old newsapapers, this book carries a stark warning of what can be lost when technology (in this case in the form of microfiche) takes over. Luckily, at the archive we have a virtually complete run of The Stamford Mercury from the middle of the eighteenth century (complete from the 1780s). We still have the microfilm, too, and use it to avoid handling the newspapers too much.
“Libraries need to move with the times, but too confident a step in the wrong direction can lead to calamity. A famous, notorious example was the decision of lending libraries to first film, then jettison, their collections of historic newspapers. The advantage was obvious, as newspapers take up an enormous space and tend to degrade; but the chosen rescue technology, microfiche, proved equally transitional. Within a few decades the microfiches were functionally unusable, and the newspapers long gone. Eventually the microfiche readers were themselves removed from the reading rooms, tomorrow’s technology now redundant.”
From The Library: A Fragile History Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen.