Under the background of the current integrated reform of government public services, the demands of the public for archives is increasingly growing and diversified. However, the effective supply of archives, especially the high-grade supply and personalized supply, is obviously insufficient, which is the basic appearance of scarcity. Unlike natural resources and artificial products, archives information resources are the highly institutionalized ''by-products". To study its scarcity, we must find reasons from the three aspects of the system.The first is the original problem about whether social activities are "all things archived", whether the archived information is "original and authentic" and whether the archival information preserved is lost over time. The second is the academic problem of the principle of provenance, the theory of life circle and the records continuum theory. And the third is the legal issue that is based on archival laws and related to the copyright law and the emerging information rights.