While out hunting for a Thomas Jefforson quote this evening I found Burn a Country’s Past and You Torch Its Future, a Washington Post Column by Robert Darnton, the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University.
“Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The lost cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
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