160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.

Re:160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Frankli... by bonemachine on Thursday January 09, 2014 @03:05PM (#7032807)

It's sad for sure that a few really cool documents were lost, but they needed to be destroyed to remove the mold threat.

The "mold threat" argument is so utterly vacuous -- it's hard to imagine that anyone making it can really be taking themselves seriously. And this pooh-poohing of the documents as being merely "cool" reflects a staggering degree of ignorance about the value of primary documents in historical (and legal) research.

At the same time... it's not hard to imagine county bureaucrats thinking pretty much exactly in these terms. "Wha, a buncha photographs? Old title papers? Whoze goona be innersted in that? Someones gonna get SICK from all that ICKY mold and we might get SUED!"

Yep -- that must have been exactly what they were thinking.

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Re:160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Frankli... by mattlutze on Friday January 10, 2014 @08:09AM (#7036381)

Your third paragraph is the thesis of my argument.

As is obvious from the archivist who has gleefully and thoroughly lambasted me upon her holy pike of preservation persecution, the layman may know painfully little about the costs and logistics involved in preserving such materials.

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Re:160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Frankli... by bonemachine on Friday January 10, 2014 @06:35PM (#7040435)

Whatever the real storage & retrieval costs may have been -- this whole "panic incineration" thing still doesn't make any sense. At all.

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