Research lost?
Here's another thought about researchers and online. Today The Herald ran a story about an accident that killed 7 farmworkers crammed into a van with 12 others. It's part of a long pattern of abuse, and yesterday I pulled together a list of previous incidents, a long shameful list starting with a 1963 wreck near Belle Glade that killed 27, including 12 children. Since space is always a problem these days (and why I'm doing less of these lately), the box that ran with the story pulled three incidents out and referred to online for the rest of the list. That's great. It means that information that might not have run will see the light.
But: this means the list won't be in our permanent archive, in Nexis and other versions of the database. What do we do? I'll try to make sure someone gets this list into the archive with a note that it only appeared online. This may come up in Google, at least in the cache, for awhile. Now that I've linked it this link is permanent. But how many more of these will be missing?