Imagine a world in which libraries and archives had never existed. No
institutions had ever systematically collected or preserved our
collective cultural past: every book, letter, or document was created,
read and then immediately thrown away. What would we know about our
past? Yet, that is precisely what is happening with the web: more and
more of our daily lives occur within the digital world, yet more than
two decades after the birth of the modern web, the "libraries" and
"archives" of this world are still just being formed.