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A Plan For Curating "Obsolete Data or Resources"

Our cultural discourse is increasingly carried in the web. With the initial emergence of the web many years ago, there was a period where conventional mediums (e.g., music, movies, books, scholarly publications) were primary and the web was a supplementary channel. This has now changed, where the web is often the primary channel, and other publishing mechanisms, if present at all, supplement the web. Unfortunately, the technology for publishing information on the web always outstrips our technology for preservation. My concern is less that we will lose data of known importance (e.g., scientific data, census data), but rather that we will lose data that we do not yet know is important. In this paper I review some of the issues and, where appropriate, proposed solutions for increasing the archivability of the web.