The Lost Art of Letters...

envelopes...
Originally uploaded by Quelle night....

This interesting New York Times article discusses the loss of literary (and other) correspondence in the digital age.

And this index, In the First Person, demonstrates some of the types of materials we may be missing in the future... diaries, letters, primary source material. The site points to oral history collections, which begs the question of preserving digital resources... For example, some powerful writing comes from first person blog-reporting and although blogs generate archives, who is archiving the blogs?

The Internet Archive features the Wayback Machine, which preserves web content, but it all seems somehow very "slippery."