Most, if not all, consumer-grade camera flashes emit a level and spectrum of light that is relatively insignificant in terms of harming library, museum, or archives materials.

Here is a link to Stephan Michalski's oft-cited article that makes this assertion:

http://cool.conservation-us.org/byorg/abbey/an/an20/an20-6/an20-607.html

Though the cumulative effects of several flash exposures over many (many, many, many) years might indeed accelerate degradation of certain pigments, the same can be said for the repeated physical handling of any particular object - including exposure to normal room lighting conditions.

I think banning flash for preservation reasons is an overreaction.

Thomas Blake (archives-L)

An interview with Peter B. Hirtle

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/commentary_and_analysis/2010_01_hirtle.html

The famous Hirtle Chart is now CC-BY! Congrats!

January 14, 2010 - CLOCKSS is pleased to announce that it has
partnered with BioMed Central, the world's largest open access
publisher, to preserve over 60,000 articles in CLOCKSS's
geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant
archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the
world. [...]

By archiving with CLOCKSS,
BioMed Central ensures that its open access articles remain open
access forever. If necessary, CLOCKSS will make this content
available, under a creative commons license, for free to all scholars
around the world.

http://www.biomedcentral.com

About CLOCKSS
CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for profit joint venture between the world's leading scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.
http://www.clockss.org

" [L]ast month, Heather Morrison pointed out that Wiley and Blackwell's Health and Social Care in the Community has agreed to deposit articles by NIH-funded authors in PMC, but has a compliance rate of exactly 0%."

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2010/01/oa-across-federal-government-hold.html

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-dec-31.html

Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. Through our user-friendly web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are accessible to the public with full-text search.

http://www.archive-it.org/

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

For further information: http://graffitianalysis.com/

"The Intimate Archive examines the issues involved in using archival material to research the personal lives of public people, in this case of Australian writers Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987), Aileen Palmer (1915–1988) and Lesbia Harford (1891–1927). The book provides an insight into the romantic experiences of the three women, based on their private letters, diaries and notebooks held in public institutions. Maryanne Dever, Ann Vickery and Sally Newman consider the ethical dilemmas that they faced while researching private material, in particular of making conclusions based on material that was possibly never intended by its subjects to be consumed publically. In this sense, the book is both an introverted contemplation of private affairs and an extroverted meditation on the right to acquire and assume intimate knowledge."
Link

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0361

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad

ABSTRACT: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by
self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles
accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA
Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because
authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this
we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory
self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in
1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both.
Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other
correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of
co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and
greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real,
independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with
quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles
receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the
more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors
self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage,
from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the
constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18346/