Historical materials found in archives are by no means representative of the general human experience in the past. Certain people and activities are overrepresented, while others are hard to find in archives. This is partially due to the fact that the most commonly used historical records are created by literate people and saved by those with the motive and means to preserve them for future use. Other reasons that materials may be included in or excluded from archives involve historical collecting practices, which for centuries favored governmental and institutional records, or materials useful for the types of historical research practiced in the nineteenth century. Although more recently archives have begun collecting materials from marginalized people and groups, paper objects that were at some point excluded from the archives were more likely than archived materials to suffer the ravages that time, disaster, and war can inflict on fragile paper. As well, archives can only contain materials that creators want to deposit, and there are many reasons a person or organization may want to keep their records away from the eyes of academic researchers. The processing of archival collection also results in the disposal of some records, due to policy or to limited scope and space for a collection. Finally, surrogates of archival materials— microfilm and digital editions—are created for the purposes of preservation, to meet demand, and to turn a profit; the competing logics of these purposes means that only some collections are reproduced, and those reproductions may not be the ones a researcher hopes will be available.