A conversation at work this morning inspired a post on the Reproducible Ideas blog about preserving documents. Physically preserving documents may be the easy part. Keeping alive the memory that the documents exist can be much harder.
[The image above is a photograph of the Rosetta Disk, a disk preserving 13,000 pages of documentation about 1,500 human languages. The information is not encoded as bits; it is engraved. A thousand years from now, a scholar could read the disk using only a microscope. Click on the image for more information about the Rosetta Disk.]