That sure sucks, but there are cases where one side of the story ain't enough... and this specific source is known to be one of them. It'd be interesting to hear what the VCF team has to say about this.
Fair question. Think how your own impression of a person would be colored, if that person shows an established pattern of dealing with talk which they disagree with/object to - banning, deleting, blocking, and otherwise suppressing it (and when that’s not an option, simply reacting with over-the-top hostility).
Would you be more likely to always take that person’s words at face value, or to question their motivation for this kind of narrative control? Wouldn’t you be more likely to seek out the other side of the story? Even when Justice, Truth and the Constitution are on your side (and maybe they are), it’s not a great look and doesn’t inspire unquestioning confidence.
(Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with VCF in any way, other than being a forum poster; I’m not even on the same continent.)
It is tempting to simply scan all this. My Only concern would be to choose a common or open format. My father collected “sky and telescope” the premier magazine for astronomers. He had a collection that spanned back to the origins in 1941. Just missing a few during the WWII years lost to the mists of time. His collection was about 19 feet long. He traded it for 7 dvds. Alas, the reader software stopped working with windows 10 and 11 and a lifetime of collecting has been lost to him.
Point is. If the donation was digitized in PDF or similar it might not be so bad that the atoms were lost. But now it seems lost forever which is a shame.
annoying but it's a problem with all museums. they have far too many items to display make available. most have huge archives of stuff that will never see the light of day.
it would be interesting to see if there's a follow up and what the organisation did to try and avoid dumping them.
Responsible organizations have other options, such as stopping accepting new submissions when storage space runs out, or looking for a new good home for the excess material they can no longer store. Or, at the very least, notify the original submitter they can no longer store the material.
A simple phone call like "hey, sorry, we have no time/space/energy to do anything with your stuff, pick it up or it will be destroyed by $DEADLINE" would certainly have solved the problem
Would you be more likely to always take that person’s words at face value, or to question their motivation for this kind of narrative control? Wouldn’t you be more likely to seek out the other side of the story? Even when Justice, Truth and the Constitution are on your side (and maybe they are), it’s not a great look and doesn’t inspire unquestioning confidence.
(Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with VCF in any way, other than being a forum poster; I’m not even on the same continent.)
Point is. If the donation was digitized in PDF or similar it might not be so bad that the atoms were lost. But now it seems lost forever which is a shame.
it would be interesting to see if there's a follow up and what the organisation did to try and avoid dumping them.