CHICAGO — Wrestling with the challenges of documents in the digital age, U.S. officials are destroying millions of paper federal court records to save storage costs. But the effort is raising the ire of some historians, private detectives and others who heavily rely on the files.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says at least 10 million bankruptcy-case files and several million district-court files from between 1970 and 1995 will be shredded, pounded to pulp and recycled. A small percentage designated as historically valuable will be kept in storage.

Experts weighed in

Federal archivists spent years consulting legal scholars, historians and others about which files to purge after realizing that sorting and digitizing just the bankruptcy cases would cost tens of millions of dollars.

None of the civil or criminal cases up for destruction went to trial, and docket sheets that list basic information such as names of defendants and plaintiffs will be saved from each case.

Such assurances haven't eased concerns of some of those whose work relies on the paper documents.

Cornell Law School professor Theodore Eisenberg said it's precisely the mundane, everyday records with no clear historical significance that are critical to establishing legal trends upon which court policy is often based.

"Something really important will be lost here," said Eisenberg, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk for the late Justice Earl Warren. "We would lose any ability to assess trends over time. This is not just a matter of history, it is a matter of influencing basic policy today."

Christina Boyd, who teaches public law at the University at Buffalo, said about 2 percent of federal cases make it to trial and little research has been done to explain why that percentage dropped from about 12 percent in the 1960s.

One question, she said, is whether federal judges began pushing settlements in the 1970s and 1980s as public aid to indigents increased, possibly to the advantage of corporations or other institutions being sued by the individuals.

"This was a crucial period in legal history," she said. "We need to understand the trends — and that means looking at files that could be going away."

Marvin Kabakoff, a senior analyst with the archives agency who holds a doctorate in history, said Thursday that ideally all the records would be digitized, "but keeping everything is just not realistic."

By the end of the year, 140,000 boxes of civil-case files — of a total of about 270,000 from the 25-year period — are expected to be destroyed, Kabakoff said.

Starting next year, about 390,000 of the 400,000 total boxes of bankruptcy-case files from the same period will be destroyed and a far smaller number of criminal case files — about 40,000 boxes — would be destroyed later.

Historically relevant

Preparing for this first-of-its-kind destruction, federal archivists decided to keep thousands of records deemed historically relevant or that fell into other categories.

With the civil files, for instance, authorities decided to save about 110,000 boxes, including all civil-rights or government-corruption files regardless of whether those cases went to trial.

Federal documents detail which files should be saved, including those related to the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet jet fighters in 1983 and files on men accused of trying to evade the Vietnam War draft.

"We tried to be very careful about what we are destroying," Kabakoff said

Some historians say it is impossible to say what records will be historically significant, since an inconsequential file today might one day shed light on a figure who emerges to prominence, from a presidential candidate to a murder suspect.