Our discussions today reminded me of a paper about the National Archives in Washington and the problems they are encountering while attempting to preserve information stored on obsolete information systems. In a seminar of graduate students from a variety of disciplines at UBC it also raised questions of when do we decide that scraps of paper, "tweets", or voice recordings are not worth saving.
I have included the reference below should anyone be interested in following up with it.
Alexander Stille, "Are We Losing Our Memory? Or the Museum of Obsolete Technology" in
The Future of the Past (2003): 299-309.
Cheers,
Ken