January 30, 2004

The Uncertain Fate of Scholarly Artifacts in a Digital Age

By SCOTT CARLSON

Obsolete systems threaten scholarship, even as technology promises a new research era

Deena Larsen talks enthusiastically about her collection of electronically linked poems, Marble Springs, stopping now and then to emphasize that it is not lost to history. Not yet, anyway.

The historian Roy Rosenzweig thinks often about the Clinton administration's e-mailing habits -- six million messages a year, all of them now part of a daunting record of the past.

Kenneth

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