Keith, good points. That's why I keep my original album sacrosanct, and look at the prints I made for studying BUT the negs stay safely stored and have never been out of their envelopes.
I just wish to add towo comments:
1. Hi-res scans can do wonders for photos but it does cost money, either in buying a scanner etc. or having the job done and then there's the mega-buck software. However there's always the future .... what will technoolgy in ten years time be able to do compared with today's?
See
http://www.trolleybus.net/group1.htm
for an example of what can happen to old slides and the best software can do now.
2. Negatives can always be copies and adjusted, and are possibly cheaper to run off, etc. I buy classic trucks photos for 50 pence now, and I just love to handle photos as part of my personal collection. The cost is too small to complain that they are not on CD and I can save the prints for the future.
However too many negatives and prints are being thrown out and here is an example of a print in my dads' post-war army album from Jaffa, Palestine [1948...note Arabic and English style rego on the 1941-on Chevy] that would have been missed if I have not decided to go through it after he had written his final set of biographies.
I cringe when I hear of so many photo archives and collections just being thrown out, sometimes in spite for some 'political' reason in companies that shoudl know better.
Another problem is when people who may have collected 50,000 negatives say in their lifetime, pass on. What do the Personal Representatives or next-of-kin do? If they sell or donate to one of the small photo archives will we ever get a chance to see them because the photographer was the only one who knew what was on them? This is the case with one archive of 80,000 photos!