“The Case of the Disappearing Article”

[via Library Journal "BackTalk: The Case of the Disappearing Article"]

I often use this example in my library class to show how even a print publication can often “lose” information in the digital age. The Library Journal article talks about a March 2, 1998 TIME magazine issue where an an article written by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam” was published as a sidebar. This was an excerpt from a book called A World Transformed discussing the reasons why Bush did not send forces to Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991. What’s curious is that the article no longer exists in the Time’s web archives version of the March 2, 1998 issue. Some other curiosities from this issue is the fact that in most of the electronic sources that have indexed the March 2, 1998 issue have an article titled “Selling the War Badly”, but in a print copy of the issue we have in the library, the table of contents show the title “Clinton’s Crisis: How Not To Sell a War.”

The first time I came across this mystery was actually from a web page, that ironically I can’t seem to find anymore, that talked about a school teacher who had assigned the article to students as a search exercise. Unfortunately, the teacher was looking at his print copy and assigned students to look for “Clinton’s Crisis: How Not To Sell a War”, and ended up with frustrated students that couldn’t find a trace of the article anywhere. It wasn’t until the teacher looked for the article, knowing that the article did indeed exist in print, that he realized the title of the article was different in the online version.

This exercise still works if you make a photo copy of the print version of this issue and ask students to look for the same article. Students will see that the photo copied table of contents shows the exact title, but when they look for the article by the title, they won’t find it. Because of the Library Journal article, it is now possible for students to find the article using a Google Search first, to find out that the title has changed, and then look for the article with the new title. Unfortunately, I can’t verify that the title in the print version was actually “Selling the War Badly” either, since the article has been torn out of our print copy. For those of you who think “microfilm,” its not concrete evidence since the microfilm gets delivered much later, and may have been fixed at that point.

Regardless of what the actual title of the print article is, this made a great example of how, without a print copy, there was no way to verify the changes that were made. I don’t suggest tearing out the article form your own copies at the library, but it would make an interesting exercise for your students if you hide the particular issue and say its missing. Then when the students go out to search for it, see how well they do in finding the article.

One last thing I wanted to highlight from the Library Journal article was that there are sites like the Memory Hole <http://www.thememoryhole.org/> that try to preserve information that often times dissappear in the digital world. Its scary to think about how easily the electronic versions can be modified or removed without anyone ever knowing that the change has been made. -KF