On March 2, 1998, TIME magazine ran an article on the public's reaction to President Clinton ordering air strikes against Iraq. "Selling the War Badly" had a sidebar by George Bush Sr. and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Titled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," the sidebar, an excerpt from their book A World Transformed, laid out the reasons Bush decided not to send forces on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War. This passage gives the gist:

Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

The article remained on TIME's web site until spring 2003, shortly before the current President ordered the attack on Baghdad to begin. "The Memory Hole" (www.thememoryhole.org), a web site devoted to preserving "lost" information, reported the article's removal from the TIME site and posted a scanned version of the original. I was sure that the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee (or some such group) would raise a stink, but I didn't see anything. So, this fall, I began looking into the matter myself.

I checked EBSCO's magazine index. The entry for the magazine's main edition only had a citation, as it had been removed "at the request of the rights holder," but it appeared full text in TIME Canada, and TIME Pacific. I called TIME and EBSCO to ask why the piece had been removed, and, to be thorough, I wrote to Bush Sr. and Scowcroft. I also checked with some other online magazine collections. Gale had the article full text. H.W. Wilson had a note saying that the article was not available at the request of the rights holder, but its search engine supplied a link to The Memory Hole's scan. FirstSearch did not have a citation, either for the main article or the sidebar. (FirstSearch may have indexed a draft edition of the magazine - it has an entry from the same issue titled "Clinton's Crisis: How Not To Sell a War," which was perhaps a working title.)

Finally, I got through to someone at TIME who told me that the authors had asked for the article to be removed. Although disappointing, that wasn't surprising - the article was pretty darn embarrassing to the current President. The next day, our telephone rang. My wife glanced at the caller ID and said, "I think you'd better take this." The caller was listed as "Bush, George." Well, it wasn't the former president, but it was his chief-of-staff, Jean Becker. She had read my letter and asked her boss about it. He said he did not ask TIME to remove the piece and in fact didn't even remember it being excerpted in the magazine. Curious himself, he had called Scowcroft, who also denied asking for the article's removal.

I called TIME again, speaking to the same person in the rights department. She told me she would look into it and call me back. I contacted Knopf, publisher of A World Transformed. The head of its serial rights department had only been on the job a few months, but she was able to tell me that Knopf's contract with TIME gave it permission to place the article on its web site "concurrent" with the print edition. However, Knopf had not asked for the article to be removed. I called TIME several more times but never received a response.

One thing was explained: EBSCO let me know that the article had been removed from its database because of a clerical error. The original indexer did not give a separate heading for the sidebar, and when EBSCO (perhaps because of Tasini) had been told to remove the text of the main article, the sidebar disappeared as well. The indexer for TIME Canada had created a separate heading for the Bush/Scowcroft piece, so it remained in the database. Curiously, TIME Canada still has "Selling the War Badly" in full text, as does the TIME web site (for a fee), leading to all sorts of interesting Tasini questions. To its credit, EBSCO restored the Bush/Scowcroft article once the mistake was realized.

I burrowed into the Internet, and found TIME's reason for removing the article. Slate (slate.msn.com) had been tracking the story and had reached Jim Kelly, TIME's managing editor. Kelly explained that the article was removed simply because Knopf's serial rights contract allowed it to be available on the web only for the week that the magazine was on the newsstands. Kelly went on to suggest that waiting three years to remove the article was probably an oversight by TIME. I double-checked other Knopf books that had been serialized in various publications. In every case, the excerpts were no longer available on the magazines' web sites. My searching also found several blogs that mentioned the article's removal from the TIME site and asserted that the article was no longer available.

Even if this whole story is one of mistakes and oversights, it remains confusing. If TIME no longer has the rights to "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," why do EBSCO and Gale? On November 13, a search of TIME's site produced a note indicating that "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" had once appeared but stating that it was removed because TIME did not have the rights to sell the piece. A week later, even that note was gone. I asked two colleagues to check the site, and they, too, found nothing. The fact TIME was the only institution that was not helpful and prompt in answering my questions has not eased my concerns.

The continued confusion about web rights has a direct effect on researchers. TIME removed the piece, H.W. Wilson removed it but maintained a link to another site, and Gale and EBSCO kept it. FirstSearch had it under a different name. Doing a search? Better use all your resources.

Libraries continue to do a lousy job of marketing their services. In my hunt through the various blogs and web pages that acknowledged the article's disappearance, not one noted that it could be found in a library. Not one mentioned electronic databases. Despite our attempts to appear hip, when it comes to reaching technologically advanced folks, we really don't seem to exist. And, on the other side of the coin, years after online magazine indexes have become a standard public library offering, the majority of patrons don't know they are there.

The concentration of print media outlets into a few corporate hands remains cause for concern. Would this column appear here if Library Journal were owned by Time-Warner? It is vital that larger libraries continue to keep and use printed indexes and copies of the historical record.

Marylaine Block urged libraries to take responsibility for the preservation of electronic information (BackTalk, LJ 12/03, p. 81). She's right. But we all need to do our part. A progressive colleague of mine prints and files important Internet documents. "If you want a permanent record," she says, "you better use a permanent medium." And we can all be more aggressive in making sure that database vendors deliver what they sell.

In 1976, I was lucky enough to be in Washington, DC, on July 4th. Amid the parades, fireworks, and bands, I made a pilgrimage to the National Archives. While waiting in line to see the embossed copy of the Declaration of Independence, I was thrilled to read the words on a great banner hung across the front of the building: "The Written Word Endures." It's our job to make sure it does.