Newspapers called it the morgue: the room where every clipping was filed, indexed, and kept, so that a claim made today could be checked against what was actually printed a decade ago. It was unglamorous, expensive, and the single most valuable thing in the building — because an institution that cannot check its own past has to take somebody's word for it.
Most organisations with a record worth keeping now have nothing of the sort. The record lives on the web, which forgets: links rot, platforms close accounts, publications quietly revise. The tools that would fix this exist, but they are national-library infrastructure — crawlers, WARC, fixity auditing, persistent identifiers, harvesting protocols — and no three-person memory project is going to stand that up between grant applications.