Here Today, Gone within a Month: The Fleeting Life of Digital News

In 1989 on the shores of Montana’s beautiful Flathead Lake, the owners of the weekly newspaper the Bigfork Eagle started TownNews.com to help community newspapers with developing technology. TownNews.com has since evolved into an integrated digital publishing and content management system used by more than 1600 newspaper, broadcast, magazine, and web-native publications in North America. TownNews.com is now headquartered on the banks of the mighty Mississippi river in Moline Illinois. Not long ago Marc Wilson, CEO of TownNews.com, noticed that of the 220,000+ e-edition pages posted on behalf of its customers at the beginning of the month, 210,000 were deleted by month’s end. What? The front page story about a local business being sold to an international corporation that I read online September 1 will be gone by September 30? As well as the story about my daughter’s 1st place finish in the district field and track meet? A 2014 national survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) of 70 digital-only and 406 hybrid (digital and print) newspapers conclusively showed that newspaper publishers also do not maintain archives of the content they produce. RJI found a dismal 12% of the “hybrid” newspapers reported even backing up their digital news content and fully 20% of the “digital-only” newspapers reported that they are backing up none of their content. Educopia Institute’s 2012 and 2015 surveys with newspapers and libraries concur, and further demonstrate that the longstanding partner to the newspaper—the library—likewise is neither collecting nor preserving this digital content. This leaves us with a bitter irony, that today, one can find stories published prior to 1922 in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and other digitized, out-of-copyright newspaper collections but cannot, and never will be able to, read a story published online less than a month ago. In this paper we look at how much news is published online that is never published in print or on more permanent media. We estimate how much online news is or will soon be forever lost because no one preserves it: not publishers, not libraries, not content management systems, and not the Internet Archive. We delve into some of the reasons why this content is not yet preserved, and we examine the persistent challenges of digital preservation and of digital curation of this content type. We then suggest a pathway forward, via some initial steps that journalists, producers, legislators, libraries, distributors, and readers may each take to begin to rectify this historical loss going forward

News, new roles & preservation advocacy: Moving Libraries into action

This paper discusses how much news is published online that is never published in print or on more permanent media. It delves into some of the reasons why this convent is not yet preserved, and examines the persistent challenges of digital preservation and of digital curation of this content type

Digitization : successful projects and the challenge of born-digital newspaper archives [videorecording]

Panel moderator: Vicky McCargarThis panel addressed several aspects of newspaper digitization projects. Jim Draper focused on a Gale/Cengage project to digitize 19th century newspapers in the British Library. Abbie Grotke explored the Library of Congress' newspaper collection and its efforts to preserve born-digital newspaper content. Martin Halbert encouraged the range of institutions at the Summit to engage in collaborative strategies for preservation, citing the Texas Digital Newspaper Program as an example. Leigh Montgomery discussed the Christian Science Monitor's archives, its philosophy on access, preservation, and revenue model and how those philosophies are incorporated into the Monitor's journalism. Frederick Zarndt presented issues relating to the digitization of historical newspapers and born-digital newspapers,including revenue stream and software challenges

Incidents of travel in Yucatan /

Contains numerous wood engraved illustrations in the text, several full-page, engraved mainly by Alexander Anderson or Joline J. Butler after Frederick Catherwood. Vol. 1 includes a map of Yucatán engraved by Charles Copley. An "Indian map" also engraved by Copley is included in vol. 2 facing p. 265. The plates are engraved after Frederick Catherwood by Joseph Napoleon Gimbrede, John A. Rolph, A. W. Graham, John Francis Eugene Prud'homme, Jordan & Halpin, Milo Osborne, Stephen Henry Gimber, Alfred Jones, Augustus Halbert, and Benjamin Johnson.Also published in London by John Murray in 1843.Mode of access: Internet.Sloan candidateBinding: publisher's full cloth, gilt boards and spine. Modern woodcut bookplate "From the library of Stephen D. Szego" pasted inside the front cover. Previous owner's ink signature on front fly-leaf in vol. 1