Because newspaper archives provide unique cultural, historical and social details of an era in real time - not just in the news but in advertisements as well. Old newspapers and microfilmed articles were the basis of research for Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling books Seabiscuit: An American Legend, and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

At a time when so much news is born digital, the need to catalog newspapers for prosperity may seem archaic or even quaint.

One thing is sure: An increasing number of publishers and libraries have had to abandon microfilming newspapers because of costs and the number of filming companies has declined, according to Brian Geiger of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California, Riverside, which has an extensive collection of microfilmed and digitalized newspaper archives. 

“The start of the recession around 2008 largely killed off what remained of microfilming for preservation,” Geiger wrote in an article that appeared in the California Publishers Association.

He warned, “If we don’t do something soon, there’s a very good chance the papers you produce today won’t be available to your children and grandchildren. Many of the newspapers published in the last decade have already been lost forever.”   

In 2010, his center began to collect PDFs from publishers who uploaded them onto a website. He said, “The challenges to saving contemporary newspaper PDFs aren’t necessarily technical. It’s not difficult to collect and archive them. The challenges are cultural and institutional. What are established workflows that we could tap to collect PDFs without creating additional cost or work for publishers? What concerns or interests, if any, do publishers have about embargoing content?”        

These are among the questions to be discussed at the next meeting of Dodging the Memory Hole (DTMH), a nationwide project based at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. DTHM’s next meeting will be in October 2016 at UCLA.