The Library and the Cloud: Digital News Production and Preservation

Abstract: In the past, in an analog world, libraries—to meet their informational responsibilities—preserved newspapers in analog form and on microfilm. With the emergence of digital technologies, preservation has evolved, and so has the creation of news. These evolutions have challenged libraries to meet their old (and ongoing) responsibilities, and they have faced this challenge by continuing to think of news in the old way: as a commodity to be captured and stored as they have always done it, by themselves, in traditional ways. Today news is not as static as it once was: a version produced for a morning audience; another, modified, for an afternoon or evening audience; each discrete and preservable by itself. News is fluid: it is created and grows as it emerges; and the news media let the information evolve as it evolves in real time. Capturing and preserving this new kind of resource forces libraries and other news-preservation agencies to rethink the old models of operation. Preservation of the news should be done with a new model of cooperation, as the present essay explains.