I agree that paper per se isn't the advantage, but the fact that something comes in a relatively unencumbered and self-contained unit does help a lot with digital archiving. That is so far still more common with paper on average. A library can build a more or less complete digital archive of a paper newspaper by simply subscribing to it and setting up a routine digitization process. Building a complete archive of an online news site is much harder: you have to figure out how to scrape it in full, and many sites actively try to stop you from doing so. As publications have discovered that selling access to their own archives (or "vault" as some call it) is profitable, they are even less likely to want free third-party archives to be available.
The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". For example a library could archive The New Inquiry by simply subscribing and downloading each month's subscribers-only PDF, rather than trying to scrape the website. A publication that put the full content in an RSS feed would also be fairly easy to "subscribe" to and archive. But most don't have an easy way of subscribing to full updates that can be archived and stored/viewed independently of the original site, and many are even kind of hostile to the idea.
Journals are another problem. Paper journal subscriptions go into a library's permanent holdings, while digital journal subscriptions often give them cheaper per-issue prices, but in return it's more like renting access to the journal-controlled archive, which goes away if the library cancels the subscription. Most don't allow a library to mass-download the archive into the library's own digital holdings, though some do have some self-archival arrangements (e.g. a library might be allowed to self-archive issues that came out during their period of subscription, but not the whole back catalogue).
>The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue".
I'd go so far as to say that publishers who do not do this and provide these to the Library of Congress should receive much less copyright protection from the government. Copyright and preservation should go hand in hand.
The best-case for "born digital" archiving at the moment are probably publications that still produce a full PDF version of each "issue". For example a library could archive The New Inquiry by simply subscribing and downloading each month's subscribers-only PDF, rather than trying to scrape the website. A publication that put the full content in an RSS feed would also be fairly easy to "subscribe" to and archive. But most don't have an easy way of subscribing to full updates that can be archived and stored/viewed independently of the original site, and many are even kind of hostile to the idea.
Journals are another problem. Paper journal subscriptions go into a library's permanent holdings, while digital journal subscriptions often give them cheaper per-issue prices, but in return it's more like renting access to the journal-controlled archive, which goes away if the library cancels the subscription. Most don't allow a library to mass-download the archive into the library's own digital holdings, though some do have some self-archival arrangements (e.g. a library might be allowed to self-archive issues that came out during their period of subscription, but not the whole back catalogue).