In this thread some people mentioned the purchasing of chip maker records for future preservation. In terms of history or preservation, while the actual records themselves are interesting, it's the information ON the records that make them valuable. What could be done is to scan the records and archive the images to a CD-ROM. At that point you would never have paper records that decompose, backing them up would take no time or money at all.

Maybe whoever would be selling such records would be willing to 'rent' them to us for a much lower fee (or a purchaser might be willing to rent out to help get his expense down).

Any thoughts?