Archival Information Lagging Behind in Internet Age

In Tolkien's fantasy trilogy Lord of the Rings, the good wizard Gandalf's suspicions about the special ring that Bilbo Baggins has just passed on to his nephew Frodo have risen to the point where he feels compelled to investigate it.  He gets on his horse and rides the great distance to the Gondor capital city of Minas Tirith, where there are stored archives going back millennia.  By painstakingly going through document after document, he finally discovers the truth...and so marks the beginning of Frodo's great adventures...

I'm not planning to embark on any fantastic quest in the near future, but from time to time I would like to investigate archives from the past...my own past, not millennia gone by.  For example, I would like to know the names of some people who were on staff at the elementary school I attended from 1965 to 1968...particularly my old physical education teacher, one of my fifth grade teachers, and the school librarian during that span.  The problem with trying to research such information on the Internet is not a matter of prying into anyone's privacy...these records should be public anyway.  The problem is that relatively few have seen fit to put archival information from paper files onto the Web...after all, they probably (and reasonably) assume that the probability that someone would want to look at any particular paper from the archives is very small.  That having been noted, I would counter that argument by saying that the people in possession of these old paper records have no way of knowing which public information they possess will be relevant to anyone in the future and which will be irrelevant.  But by having archival documents and data available, there will be a great amount of interest in it by Internet users.  It was only a fictional tale, but the keepers of Gondor's Minas Tirith library preserved their old papers by a sense of reverance for history and continuity with the past.  Had they done as modern libraries do nowadays and disposed of books that not "enough" patrons used, our Gandalf might have come up empty with his investigation...and then where would Tolkien be?  And with this I wonder how many old paper archival records that might be transferred to the World Wide Web even exist now, or have they been destroyed and lost forever for the sake of a misplaced sense of expediency and tidiness...

There is a great need for archives on the Internet that can be publicly accessed.  And by "publicly accessed", I mean by anyone.  I'm sure there is a cost involved with making archives available on the Internet, so charging a small user fee per visit may be an acceptable way of meeting it.  After all, I don't expect people to just sit there for hour after hour transferring paper to computer without compensation.  But a single use of such archives should be affordable and reasonable as well and the user should neither be automatically forced to commit to an exorbitant subscription fee nor have to obtain special permission for access...