Just think: When we all die, some historian is going to get his/her/its hands/pseudopods/etc... on one of the most important historical documents of our era, the Livejournal database!
Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.
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Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.