Flooding Threatens The Times’s Picture Archive.

[elleng]

A broken pipe on Saturday morning sent water cascading into the morgue — the storage area where The Times keeps its immense collection of historical photos, along with newspaper clippings, microfilm records, books and other archival material — causing minor damage and raising significant alarm.

And it raised the question of how in the digital age — and in the prohibitive Midtown Manhattan real estate market — can some of the company’s most precious physical assets and intellectual property be safely and reasonably stored?

Jeff Roth, the morgue manager, said it appeared that about 90 percent of the affected photos would be salvageable, but it is too early to say with any certainty how many were lost.

Though he stood undaunted among rubber drums and wastebaskets catching the residual water dripping from the ceiling, Mr. Roth made it clear that this was the stuff of nightmares.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/insider/flooding-threatens-the-timess-picture-archive.html

[enlightenment]

1. This is heartbreaking.

Every year we lose more and more of our past - and in this "digital age" we are failing to comprehensively store our present for the future.

I fear that in a hundred years, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out before then, we will be as ignorant of our past as we were in the early Middle Ages. Only stories - like Homer's Troy and Atlantis - will remain and our descendants will look on the artifacts that remain without a clue as to why they existed.

[MADem]

2. Incompetent buffoons--they should have digitized their collection eons ago.

This is just stupidity on their part and there is no excuse for it:

What makes the card catalog irreplaceable is that it has never been digitized. Hundreds of thousands of people and subjects are keyed by index numbers to the photo files, which contain an estimated six million prints and contact sheets.

“Those getting even a little wet would have left them smudged, smeared and stuck together,” Mr. Koppel said. “They are our blueprints to the morgue. Without them, the material is lost.”

[No Vested Interest]

3. Penny-wise and pound foolish.

This is the same type of thinking as those who have not funded maintenance of our infrastructure.
Short-term profits are king.
Forget about posterity.