It is true that a lot more stuff gets kept these days. But we seem to be much more liable to losing important information. As Bret Victor [0] has pointed out, w

It is true that a lot more stuff gets kept these days. But we seem to be much more liable to losing important information. As Bret Victor [0] has pointed out, we use largely the same mechanisms for managing the most trivial to the most important information, and most people don't really understand how they work. > a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, "more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information." [1] I doubt that the US Supreme Court was regularly losing track of cited documents before "information technology" came along. A lot of documents may be recoverable even if the original URLs are broken, but is this really the best we can do to manage information in the information age? [0]: http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb