For most of the history of the press, a newspaper had a short useful life. It was read, and then it was gone: not destroyed, exactly, but dispersed into archives and libraries where it could in principle be found, but only by someone willing to go and look, page by page, with a reason. Yesterday's news was, for practical purposes, out of reach. That practical inaccessibility has quietly ended.

What ended it is the steady digitisation of historic newspapers. Collections that once existed only on paper or film, consultable only in person, are being converted into searchable form. The significance is not merely that the old press is preserved. It is that it has become searchable by name. A mention that was effectively lost in a paper from years ago can now be retrieved by anyone who searches for the person named in it.

This revives a settled past. A person, or their family, may have been mentioned in the press long ago, in connection with an event, a transaction, a matter now distant. That mention had, in effect, faded; it was no longer part of the accessible record. Digitisation brings it back into reach, not as something newly published but as something newly findable, which for the purposes of exposure amounts to nearly the same thing.

It is a particular feature of this kind of revival that it is not under anyone's control and not announced. A collection is digitised on its own schedule, for its own reasons of preservation and access. The people mentioned in it are not consulted and not informed. They may simply discover, or fail to discover, that a part of the past they considered closed has quietly become searchable.

There is no objection to be made to the preservation of the historic press, which is a genuine good. But its consequence for individuals deserves to be seen clearly. The accessible record of a person now extends backwards in a way it did not before, and it continues to extend as more of the old press is converted. The past is becoming less past.

The reasonable response is to include this long view in any honest account of one's exposure: to consider not only what the current record says but what the historic record, as it becomes searchable, may add; and to understand that this is a moving boundary. What is out of reach today because it has not yet been digitised may not stay out of reach, and a complete picture is one that anticipates the archive catching up.