Historical Features

Hi, I’m new to OSM. Looks pretty interesting.

I see some items in on the map in my neighborhood that used to be there, but aren’t anymore. Namely, I see a couple of points tagged with the name of old public schools that have been shut down. One was torn down several years ago, and with the other, the building remains, but was used as a church for a while, but is now abandoned.

It seems like for historical purposes, someone somewhere might like to know where those schools were. But they aren’t there now. I imagine the same being the case for other features.

If I want to contribute my knowledge base to the map, would I just delete those features, or is there some way to annotate the fact that the feature is no longer present, while maintaining some kind of historical marker?

Thanks.

You live in the USA, correct? I also suspected that some nodes from the TIGER-Import are out of date.
If the object is no longer present: Delete it.
If the object is still there but no longer in operation: Add a tag abandoned=yes (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Abandoned)