"What is remembered about the past depends on the way it is represented, which has more to do with the present power of groups to fashion its image than with the ability of historians to evoke its memory. . . The reality of the past . . resides in the artifacts of its representation."
(Hutton re: Foucault, p. 6)
The web is being built by individuals whose interests and tastes are representative of late 20th century primarily western, english-speaking culture. We build the web in our own image. But there are many contributors to that culture. While commercial organizations have become the most visible recently, a number of groups are attempting to fashion the web to represent not only our current culture but also our past. (Contrarily, certain groups are making sure to erase the past: see the recent changes to the White House pages!)
Despite the lessons taught by crumbling books printed on acid-based papers, and unuseable data stored on archaic media, much of the web disappears daily. Link rot, the scourge of the web where creators of pages have removed pages that others have linked to, is a daily occurrence. The web does not archive itself, though some organizations are attempting to create archives of web spaces on a recurring basis.
However, archival groups, having seen the power of the web to provide global access to digital surrogates of their materials, are attempting to harness that capacity by creating online digital collections that have stability, longevity, and cross-web searchability designed into them from the beginning.
UVM is no exception. Some early experiments are available at http://etext.uvm.edu, with more planned. Some information in this area is also available (barring link rot!) at http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/scriptorium.html