I just finished reading a great blog post from Romney Whitehead titled, "Curation before Creation." I found this very relevant to my world and something that reminded me of my experience in the stock footage industry in the 80's and 90's.
Back then, agencies were competing on the total volume of materials available,
"We've got over x million shots"
"X thousands of hours of footage," etc.
At The Image Bank (in the pre-Getty days) we realized that the only thing worse than X million of anything was the thought of having even more. The focus shifted to quality of content and NOT volume and curation holds true even more so today. Just because we can save everything doesn't mean we should or at least should at the same level of service, access and completeness. Yes, occasionally a real gem will get overlooked only later to emerge but fear of that shouldn't prevent us all from maximizing our environments, workflows and processes so the most valuable content gets the focus, attention and access that it warrants.
Good content rules and good user experiences from quickly finding very relevant content keeps everyone happy.