Digital Issues

I don't think it's unprofessional of me to tell you that this post scares the heck out of me. On a daily basis, in my job, I identify, capture, backup, upload, and create metadata for at-risk digital government documents. But rather than spend my every day in abject panic about all the information that's going to go missing and/or degrade over time and/or be inaccessible one day for software/hardware reasons, I try not to think about these issues so much.

Then I read a post like this, and I'm reminded of why my position exists in the first place, and my little librarian soul starts to quake with the fear of all that potentially lost information.

And what's the "best"--or at least, easiest--solution at the moment? Making an analog copy--aka, printing it out.

Wait a minute, isn't part of the glory of the digital medium that it saves trees and frees up valuable library storage space?

It's a larger version of my own personal quandry--do I use Lulu.com to print an archive of my blog posts for the past year, or do I back them up on CD-R, or are they best left as an ephermal pleasure, not left to haunt future generations?