It is clear now that paper archives are far superior to digital ones.
Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased.
We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.
> We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.
With digitization, we're losing a lot of documents from before 20th century as well, thanks to people who figure that digital scans are cheaper to keep than the paper originals, or worse, who also think someone else already digitized them (they didn't, because they also thought the same).
They certainly do. File formats become obsolete, the drives can accumulate errors, when copying the files from an old drive to a new one, some files may get forgotten about, someone loses some metadata, etc.
Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased.
We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.