> This excessive detail seems nutty to me, and ultimately counterproductive. It's counterproductive in that it reduces the amount of things that can be preserve

> This excessive detail seems nutty to me, and ultimately counterproductive. It's counterproductive in that it reduces the amount of things that can be preserved. What's more important - audio detail that cannot be heard, or more records? The guy was working in a pretty important national archive, on what sounds like are rare or one-of a kind artifacts. Archives aren't just about preservation, but preservation in a way that allows research to be performed. Research will likely need high quality copies of good provenience, and all the record-keeping could help explain some phenomenon that was introduced during the digitization process. So, if they just did a quick an dirty rip of as much stuff as they could, they could probably "preserve" more, but that data might be useless to some future research project after the original has degraded into uselessness. And in any case, my bet is most well-preserved physical objects (at least paper ones) will long outlast any digital copies that are made today.