Three: Libraries Can Preserve Local Digital News

Libraries can preserve local/independent digital news and media for posterity.

Librarians have an opportunity to help journalists and media creators archive and maintain perpetual access to their content. Some of this is already happening in projects like Preserve This Podcast. At a minimum, librarians (and archivists) could offer their professional expertise through training to groups like News Futures.

Some academic libraries have made agreements with local newsrooms to archive their photo morgues—UNR for example. Academic libraries could similarly archive digital articles that local nonprofit newsrooms have published under creative commons. These kinds of partnerships could be good entry points for building ongoing collaborative relationships.

Beyond technical solutions, there is a need to normalize among rights originators, including journalists, that what matters more than capturing every dollar from their work is ensuring that every library can make it available in perpetuity.

“I’m a rights originator. I do not care if I make every dollar. I care if my work is preserved in libraries. Much, much, much, much more than that. And that is what we need to normalize for all rights originators. For poets, for writers, for journalists, for novelists, for essayists. Everybody needs to know the most important thing about the posterity of my work isn’t that I get every dollar for it. It’s that it’s in every library I can get it in so that it will survive.”

– Maria Bustillos