While the average website or e-mail would hardly qualify to be described as vital cultural artifacts, electronic information and communications are now so vital to every aspect of daily life that future generations could find an enormous "black hole in people's collective memory" if important digital material is allowed to disappear, according to the Digital Preservation Coalition:
At risk. is everything from government records, which would previously have been published on paper but which now exist only in electronic form, to scientific data, computer games and personal websites, representatives of the coalition--made up of 17 British libraries, museums, archiving organisations and academic bodies--hold a meeting at the House of Commons.
Take computer games as examples, Britain is a world leader in developing computer games, with titles such as Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto bringing in bigger revenues than the domestic film and music industries combined. But some of the original 1980s games, often developed by teenagers using home computers, have all but disappeared.
The warning comes amid a growing realization internationally that society's increasing reliance on information and communications technology raises serious problem with guaranteeing long term access to material which is available only in formats that are likely to become technologically obsolete.
The task of archiving even a small slice of important digital material is massive. While books hundreds of years old can still be read, electronic material from just a few years ago may already have been lost because it was only available briefly online or was preserved in an obsolete form.
The ephemeral, do-it-yourself nature of the Internet also poses a huge challenge. Internet users may feel deluged by the vast amounts of information available online, with thousands of new pages appearing every day, the vast majority of it of little general interest.
But with the average web page enjoying an online lifespan of barely four weeks, institutions like the British Library are now working on ways to select material worthy of preservation from the millions of web pages before it disappears, and store it in a way which allows access for future generations.
"A lot of people think the web is just porn and music downloads," Helen Shenton, head of collections care at the British Library told the Guardian.
"Much of it certainly is, but there is also a lot of important stuff, ephemeral publications, for example, which would have been published on paper before but now only exist as a web page."
As the legal repository for every book published by a UK imprint, the British Library receives about 150,000 paper publications a year to archive. But it believes that thousands of digital publications are being lost.
Since January 200i, when it launched a voluntary repository for electronic material, it has received only about 3,000 items, a fraction of the amount which should be preserved.
Lloyd Grossman, broadcaster and chairman of the Campaign for Museums, contrasted the experience of e-mail with that of the telegram. While the first telegram was preserved and has now been digitalized, the first e-mail, sent 31 years ago, has been lost. Grossman said: "E-mail took many years to become today's pervasive form. of communication and we are now beginning to realise how digital materials are more ephemeral than traditional materials.
"Sometimes the significance of key developments in new technologies may take several years to be recognized. The implications for our intellectual and cultural record and their preservation are profound."
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A. the out-of-date preservation method
B. the problem concerning intellectual property rights
C. the nature of short-time online existence 9f the digital information
D. the difficulty in storing vast amount of information available online