When I worked at Yale there was a set of about 10 paige boxes packed with 
IBM punch cards. No one really knew what they were for; they were afraid 
to discard them, and yet refused to find a way to make them readable or 
useful to research. I ended up leaving it on the shelf for someone else to 
figure out. A previous archivist pinched a handful and used them for 
notecards.

...and the boxes were in a not too dirty, but dark and stale basement of 
an old bakery, jammed up against an old steam radiator. Oddly, the heat 
and humidity did not produce any vermin or degradation. That was one of 
Yale's better basements.

Paper records will live on for many more generations and will not decrease 
in volume until printers and copiers stop printing and copying onto paper 
-- like the joke about the paperless toilet.

Stephen Cohen, Records Manager
MetLife \ Legal Affairs
1095 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10036-6796
212-578-2373
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