A few years ago I got the urge to dig out my old (very good) turntable and play some of the few vinyls I had. The problem was that I felt that I really needed to replace the needle/pickup due to some "storage deterioration."

Conclusion: It's a lot easier to find a decent turntable than it is to get a good needle for it, and using a worn-out or damaged one can be very hard on your vinyls.

It's also advisable to use the right needle for the vinyl you're playing, since the "skinny ones" intended for stereo LPs can cut the bottom of the grooves in older mono records, and the big ones intended for mono disks may plow the entire groove out of existence on an LP.

It also is an absolute fiction that "vinyl lasts forever." ALL MATERIALS you can make anything out of will "spontaneously" creep and change dimensions in time, and vinyl is among the "really creepy" things in common use. The recordings will still "sound good" after a very long time, but probably don't really "sound the same" as when they were fresh. Fortunately(?) it's a lot harder to "quantify the changes" for analog signals than for digital ones, and even harder to hear them (until they get really gross), so it's still appropriate to protect and preserve what you have on good vinyl, if it's of value to you.

It's impossible to pick a "best" method for archiving, since we can't tell how long anything will last until we live long enough to say "well, that one didn't." With a little optimism, we can guess that what we can pick off of older forms now, and save in digital form, may quite possibly remain unchanged when all the vinyl has sagged into heaps and lumps. (But I don't expect to be around to settle the arguments about what "shoulda been done instead of ..." by then.)

John