"William M. Klimon" writes:

(2) One of those other topics, e.g., is a chapter on the chemical
deacidification experiments that were conducted in the early 1990s. I saw
with my own eyes (and smelled with my own nose) the fabulous failure of
those experiments as the books that JHU's M.S. Eisenhower Library sent out
came back burned and unusable. I have never seen anyone dispute this
chapter of DOUBLE FOLD.

It was an experiment. Not all experiments are successes.

(3) I don't think Baker anywhere says that there shouldn't be microfilming.
He does focus on its failures, without perhaps highlighting its many
benefits. What he does say, though, which I think is beyond dispute, is
that the microfilming of a given title ought not to be a license to disgard
ALL the originals of that work--again, as I recall, he gives some examples
of exactly that sad event happening.

Ideally, yes. But in a typical library they have more items than
space. Preserving the original newspapers means setting aside a
restricted space (because they're too fragile to let anyone use them),
and they disintegrate anyway.

The most compelling example Baker gave is of an incomplete run being
microfilmedd and then (as far as he could discover) complete runs
being discarded in favor of the microfilm. But that situation is
rare; usually microfilm makers go to considerable effort to find
missing issues. If they can't find any copies, they usually state
that on the box and the first few frames of the microfilm, and most
libraries check that before discarding. If a library does find a
missing issue, it is possible to film it and then splice it into the
microfilm.

(4) As for the durability of newspaper, it can certainly last longer than 75
years. I have in my collection of early Catholic Americana 30 issues from
1833 of THE JESUIT, the first Catholic newspaper in the U.S., a weekly
published in Boston, which continues today as the Boston PILOT:

That's before wood pulp newsprint.

http://www.rcab.org/pilot.html

You can view beautifully preserved newspapers older than 75 years at Baker's
American Newspaper Repository:

A few fortunate examples doesn't mean they'd survive that long
in general, especially in a library where they get used.

-- Patrick