The NYPL is treating Brodeur as it would an imaginative novelist, which seems to me to be something of a category error. All writers are not the same, and if you’re going to go to the trouble of archiving a journalist’s work, you should take the subject matter of the journalism seriously and also preserve the record of how that writer wrote, on top of what that writer wrote.
If the NYPL is right that junking journalistic research constitutes “best professional practice” in the world of libraries, then maybe it’s time to revisit those standards. I do appreciate that there are always space constraints. But Brodeur believes — with good reason — that some other library would have found the space to house his archive in full. If the NYPL didn’t intend to do that in 1992, it should have told him so explicitly. And if it’s changed its mind on such matters, as “best professional practices” have evolved over the years, it should be a bit more up-front and apologetic about that fact.
The case of Paul Brodeur vs the NYPL | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com
