Reading through the daily grind I came across a less then noted article on New Scientist blog about how the Library of Congress has a project that will be archiving and preserving early computer games, online novels and Virtual Worlds. This to me is an interesting task since I’ve worked with the delima of preserving digital media. Ten years ago a lot of things were on media like Zip drives that don’t exist anymore. At the same time books and news articles have been around for hundreds of years in the form of paper.

So, how would the future look back on our virtual worlds like Second Life and World of War Craft? Would it be possible for someone thirty or fifty years in the future to login and see what they looked like the same way I can read the New York Times online from 1958? As we build our computer systems and new technologies we forget the importance of writing about it, and keeping that writing available for generations to come. The only way the future will know how we lived fifty, a hundred or five hundred years is by what we did with our time. As the TV guys archive and preserve the latest episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI we should keep in mind of preserving our virtual worlds and online addictions for the generations to come.