The New York Times is running an interesting article about how the National Steinbeck Center and other similar, often fiscally challenged intstitutions that house valuable historical collections, which have not yet been digitized and uploaded to the web, risk being forgotten in a world that is increasingly digitized. The piece is based on an unstated premise – that humanity will be able to sustain a level of technological advancement necessary for a web or even the power infrastructure needed to maintain it. I don’t want us all to get flooded by rising sea levels or killed by a new killer virus, but I’m just saying. Someday, the only remaining evidence of our existnce may be minute pieces of physical artifacts.