Remember, this is for posterity….

In the final month before I handed in my dissertation, I was working in my office at Stanford when the fire alarm went off. I gathered my things to leave the room, including my laptop with the digital version of the dissertation (during grad school, that laptop was rarely more than ten feet away from me). Leaving the building, I was surprised to see that there was an actual fire in the building? My first reaction? “Thank God I got the dissertation out. Even if something had happened to me, at least my work would survive!” This is how academics think — will their work live on? I relate this anecdote because the Library of Congress has a project called MINERVA — short for Mapping the INternet Electronic Resources Virtual Archive. According to this explanatory page:

An ever-increasing amount of the world’s cultural and intellectual output is presently created in digital formats and does not exist in any physical form. Such materials are colloquially described as “born digital.” This born digital realm includes open access materials on the World Wide Web. The MINERVA Web Preservation Project was established to initiate a broad program to collect and preserve these primary source materials. A multi disciplinary team of Library staff representing cataloging, legal, public services, and technology services is studying methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve these materials for future generations of researchers.

Today I received an e-mail stating that: “The Library has selected your site for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials.” What does this mean? Practically speaking, it means the following:

[T]he Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your Web site at regular intervals. The Library will make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library’s public access Web site. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Web materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them.

Well, I do share that vision, but my reader-commentors may not. So consider this a public service notice — your comments are being recorded for posterity. Think about it — decades or centuries from now, some struggling graduate student may be reading some of this. That poor, pathetic soul.