"Together with the material arrangements like boxes, folders, cans and chests and various reading devices, all the documents relating to a period of time form a 'time machine'. Later generations will thus arrive at their interpretation of their past and then append it to the swelling stream of information (...). The primary sources of a time are always the most important. (...) As early as the seventies the idea emerged that information relating directly to the underground (...) must be made universally accessible. (...) The fact that there is a mass distribution of some documents on the Net, does not mean that they will be found later in massive quantities. This has been the case from the first printed bibles from the late middle ages to the dime novels of today. This is the reason for a new project, for a Wide Area Archive & Library (working title) at the IISG[19]. The aim is to preserve a part of the information relevant to social history that is available on the Net. (...) The storage medium chosen for this is the CD-Rom (...). It is a question of adapting the traditional methods of accessing the information of these enormous digital information stores using automatic or semi-automatic methods. (...) It no longer matters which carrier one generation ultimately uses to pass on their data to the next generation. We are no longer collecting the carriers - the clay tablets, books, floppies, CD-Rom or DVD-Rom, but rather the information. (...) Collecting, archiving and making information available is too often regarded as a purely technical problem. Now untiring info-robots are supposed to achieve what humanity has never succeeded in doing. As dynamic, interactive documents in the World Wide Web are collected, this seems to be an entirely new phenomenon. The question is whether it is even possible to collect[20] this kind of information." [21]
[19]The International Institute for Social
History, which has grown out of the documentation center for social movements
at the University Library Amsterdam, comprises hundreds of archives and
collections from persons and organizations, as well as 20000 posters, 4000
records, 19000 leaflets, books, magazines and audio-visual material on the
political-cultural movement of the sixties.
[20]Cf.
http://www.cinemedia.net/FOD/FOD0055.html