Redundancies of the past – Remember when printing a webpage made sense?

Today  I saw this tweet in my stream:

These sorts of questions are pretty common, but what James is looking for is part of an old database of news clippings that is long since abandoned. The records remain in TRID and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I found out the binders with the clippings were still around.  Now they’re tucked away in a pretty anonymous filing cabinet in an attic.

Looking through the files there were only a handful of actual clippings. Most of the contents were print-outs of articles from news paper websites. (As seen from the example above.) So I sent James the scan of the print out of the article from a website in 2000. I also found the text of the article through Newsbank. It’s easy for us now in 2012 to laugh about a binder full of printed out webpages from 2000, but who really knew back then what we’d have today. Web archiving wasn’t really a thing, and websites died all the time. They still die.

When I was weeding the collection last a couple of months ago, I came across several catalogued printouts like this. Some of them were reports that weren’t published as PDFs (remember the days before PDFs became the standard?), so it was just a webpage. Others were printouts of PDFs. Now, due to space and budget, we’d archive the file and not bother with the physical copy at all. So these binders and their kind are a nice little throwback to a confused time.


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