Paramount Global recently pulled down its websites containing the archives of MTV News and CMT.com, removing access to a vast archive of decades of music journalism. Many were shocked by this, but they were clearly not librarians:

Bluesky post reading: "Digital preservation is more expensive than preserving paper; it takes more staff, active attention, and consistent computing resources. Libraries have discussed “digital dark age” since the 1990s. "

With that in mind, let’s turn to the video below from XKCD’s Randall Munroe, who provides some sense of costs for what it would take to maintain a constantly up-to-date print archive of Wikipedia. The actual printing of the the corpus of Wikipedia isn’t the problem here, it’s the near constant edits, around 100 per minute or 150,000 per day. Munroe estimates that you could keep up with the changes with a mere six inkjet printers, which leads to the real costs, all those ink cartridges.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

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