Slate ran an article about a week ago on this sort of thing; it's mostly about the challenges of building and maintaining archives in the digital age, dealing not just the archival loss of our common history, but its active and relentless commodification. Money grafs:

The (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) paper had an existing relationship with Newsbank, a digitization and archiving company based in Florida. In 2014, Newsbank approach the Milwaukee Public Library about buying the rights to the Journal-Sentinel archives. The MPL already subscribed to two Newsbank services—an obituary archive and a modern database of the Journal-Sentinel–and regularly purchases proprietary databases whose subscription fees are in the low five figures. But it couldn’t afford the Journal-Sentinel archives.

In May, Newsbank came to the MPL again, offering a menu of purchase options. The most expansive offer was almost $1.5 million, with an annual hosting fee. That nearly amounted to the library's entire $1.7 million annual materials budget. “To be asked to purchase outright something for a million dollars is just out of our scope of possibility,” said Paula Kiely, the library director.

Then, in August, Newsbank let the other shoe drop: According to Urban Milwaukee, Gannett—which purchased the paper in April—asked the Journal-Sentinel to ask Google to remove the paper’s digital archives, which the company did. It’s harder to sell a product when it’s being given away for free, after all.

Things aren't all doom-and-gloom for the good people of Milwaukee, or at least historians thereof, of course, as their newspaper archives are still searchable on microfilm at the paper itself, and there's a digital solution forthcoming... which all, of course, depend on the paper itself not folding anytime soon.

-Merc
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