RE: The Economist and e-Archiving

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Our patrimony goes far beyond scholarly archiving. Library
responsibilities for preserving access to our intellectual heritage have
traditionally been focused on primary materials. It is primary materials
that from the economist example are at risk. How can we accept the
intentional destruction of formally published material even when it is
wrong, offensive, libelous, etc. and even pretend to pass on to the future
a fair and broad sample of formally published content documenting the
excesses as well as the pluses of our own time. Legally mandated
destruction of such content is wrong. In very short order "law" has made
the archive of the economist which is a significant portion of our daily
record unavailable for the future. You can't even go see what the lawsuit
was about! That is a serious abuse of a resource that is a core title in
anybody's book. If you can't find the past, you can't understand the
future.  Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: David Goodman [mailto:dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 11:13 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: The Economist and e-Archiving

This argument is sufficiently refuted by mentioning two instances of
material that was held to be "unlawful":  Satanic verses, and Spycatcher

Whether the editors of the journal concerned consider the material to be
just or unjust, they are obeying the court order out of prudence, and not
even I would expect a commercial publisher to do otherwise.

As I see it, the appropriate purpose of law is maintaining the established
social order, while the purpose of scholarship is establishing the truth,
regardless of the established social order. If this produces
contradictions, the librarian does not have to resolve them, because the
purpose of librarianship is much simpler and less ambiguous: preserving
the record and maintaining public access.

David Goodman