"...memory is only able to endure within sustaining social contexts."
(Hutton re: Halbwachs, p. 6)
As mentioned, the current web reflects the interests of the period that has seen its birth. One of the challenges for web archivists and the future web, as for any collectors of our cultural heritage, is to represent that heritage fully. As an example, let us look at the checkered career of 19th century American women writers.
Antebellum U.S. saw an explosion of publication, much of it produced by women. Like their male counterparts, women writers wrote on a variety of subjects in a variety of genres. Post-war women writers found their choice of publishable genres circumscribed. By the turn of the century, antebellum women's writing had been labelled, negatively, as sentimental. By the early decades of the 20th century, it had all but been forgotten. Certainly, mid-century critics when considering it at all, dismissed its quality and neglected to mention its volume and variety.
The women's movement of the 1960s and 70s fueled the quest for this literature that continues to this day. At the same time, scholars saw in the writing a reflection of their own need for confirmation as women scholars, emphasizing the feminist aspects of the writing even while acknowledging that it might not be "good literature." With the recovery process well underway, scholars of the 1990s have begun to promote a more balanced view of both the quality and circumstances of the writing, situating it as neither simply sentimental or gender-specific but as part of the white, middle-class, writing milieux from which it came.
Enter the web, which has provided a fertile environment for this kind of recovery project. Not only can infromation about the writers be discussed and shared, the actual writings can be posted. Even though this is a topic of interest to current scholars, the number of people interested is not enough to make reprints of all these writings commercially viable, though there are some authors currently in vogue whose works are being republished. The web offers a space for casual and professional recovery of the literature and its creators, as well as a place to carry those recovery efforts to future generations.
But the web also poses a challenge: will such recovery efforts be in vain if sufficient care is not taken to ensure their continued viability? What happens when 19th century American women's writing is no longer a "hot" topic? What happens if the recovery efforts are poorly planned and do not provide for longevity of the contents or its media?