Scarcity or Abundance? : Preserving the Past in a Digital Age

While researching articles for a bibliography on digitial preservation, I ran across this article that seemed worth sharing:

Rosenzweig, Roy. Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. American Historical Review, v. 108, no. 3, p. 735, June 2003. (28 pages)

This article provides a good overview of the stakes involved in digital preservation, why web docs disappear, explains why historians can’t fully count on the Internet Archive, and worries about the problems historians might face if digital preservation efforts are successful. Article also insists that digital preservation is much too important to be left to the technologists and that archivists and librarians need to be involved.

My thanks to the Center for History and New Media for making this article available online.

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