Library Journal – The Case of the Disappearing Article
by Tony Greiner — 4/15/2004.
Greiner became intrigued by the removal of an article by George Bush Sr. and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft from the Time magazine website. The article, a sidebar to an article on the public’s reaction to President Clinton ordering air strikes against Iraq, “Selling the War Badly,” was titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam,” and was an excerpt from the book A World Transformed. It laid out the reasons Bush decided not to send forces on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War.
TIME removed the piece, H.W. Wilson removed it but maintained a link to another site, and Gale and EBSCO kept it. FirstSearch had it under a different name.
Greiner draws several conclusions. Of the sites he found on the web that noted the article’s disappearance, none mentioned that it could be found in a libraries or that it might be in
electronic databases. “Libraries continue to do a lousy job of marketing their services” Greiner notes. Also:
The concentration of print media outlets into a few corporate hands remains cause for concern. Would this column appear here if Library Journal were owned by Time-Warner? It is vital that larger libraries continue to keep and use printed indexes and copies of the historical record.
He closes by urging “libraries to take responsibility for the preservation of electronic information.”
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