RE: a preservation experience

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

A comment on archiving. We have very little positive experience with
publishers actually taking on the archival role historically. Libraries,
individuals, collectors, etc. have been the source for many, if not most,
"archival" digitizing, or actually resurection- rather than publisher's
own files of what they have published. This is true not only in scholarly
publishing, but in every form of Intellectual property being reborn
digitally that I am aware of. I of course would be delighted to hear of
commercial or other operations that actually had the full content of their
older material and were digitizing it. Silent films, as an example, seem
not to have come from publisher's vaults much, but from hit or miss
survival worldwide. Similarly with radio programs, and of course we no
longer have Johnny Carsons early shows because the studio re-used the
film.  This fact of life, that the old stuff isn't worth much to the
owner, is why an orphan intellectual property law or opportunity is such a
critical necessity if we are to see actual survival of intellectual
property beyond its immediate finanicially viable period. I think the
figure for economically viable, i.e. still in print, after 75 years is
somwhere around 2% of books published for example.

Chuck