Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure

I was, believe it if you wish, thinking about old TV guides just this morning and wondering how one would even go about archiving those. Most of the stumbling blocks for taking apart the glued binding for scanning have been figured out, of course, but for any given week there may have been as many as 60 or 70 editions (for each television market, I think). None of these have proper ISSN numbers as far as I'm aware, and other than the listings they can be visually indistinguishable. Then there is the challenge of finding those, and not knowing whether this or that edition is missing (from time to time, the company would create new additions for new regions, or fold old ones back into some other are) along with even parsing the content. Many of these tv shows aren't on themoviedb or thetvdb, and if the shows are, then there won't be episode listings (there were 6000 Donahue talk show episodes, after all). On top of all of that, you can't necessarily know what was on tv at a given time and day, with federal government preemptions, commercials, unreported last-minute rescheduling, etc.

But I can also see why people might want to keep more interesting data, like when the Federal Cheese-Sniffing Agency moved offices back in 1982 and they have meticulous records of the 483 filing cabinets that had to be moved from the original location to their new home in Furrytown, Pennsylvania.