Trust me, current historians are already very upset about this. Loss of sources has always been an issue - paper degrades or is destroyed, physical sources can be lost. But with the advent of more modern sources, this has gotten an entirely different dimension. While some parchment or paper can theoretically be kept available for hundreds of years when kept in decent conditions and still be available to us, this isn't the case with some forms of media. In 100 years, will we still have the equipment available to access - say - laserdisks or CDs or something more obscure? Worse still, many of these new media are very, very fragile. Film, for instance, degrades very, very quickly - as do CDs. Combine this with the disastrous archival policies of the institutions that made these things and you get situations where most of early TV broadcasts are lost to the ages. And every day we're losing more and more.

The solution at hand seems to be digitalisation. Digitalising these media - but also texts and photos, for instance - can essentially make them indestructible. The problem, however, is that this is a slow and very, very expensive process. I've done some research on this and I've found that most of the archival world is already starting projects left and right to digitalise their collections, with varying levels of success. For instance, here in Belgium, there were plans to digitalise the archives of the public broadcast, but that plan got put on hold once the recession hit. A more successful example would be the Netherlands, where there are several institutions working on digitalising their patrimony. (Beeld en Geluid, EYE) They even had a program where you could send in your home videos which would then be digitalised - you'd get a copy and they'd keep the original and a copy of their own. I've seem to have lost my notes on all of this, but I can tell you that the cost of digitalising everything in Europe alone would be a billion euro operation. Which is a big stumbling block for success.

And the internet falls into this same problem, I think. The majority of the archival community are focussing on these media first, the internet doesn't even come into it yet. Though there have been voices that advocate digital archives of the internet - I'm not sure how they'd get that done, though.

As to policy, I think that here in Belgium (and certainly in the Netherlands) all broadcasters (of the public network at least) are obligated to deliver a copy of their productions to the national archives. Same with film makers. That's as good a step as any, though there's still a huge back-catalogue that has to be dealt with. Digitalising drives should be held and should be funded, obviously. It's more difficult with the internet, though, as the selection process of what to save would be daunting to say the least.

In Protesting the Past. Contesting Authority in History and the Past, Blouin and Rosenberg address a specific problem in regards to history and archival practice.

One problem they notice is how both disciplines have grown apart since their 'shared birth' in the 19th century. Historians more and more turn to different forms of evidence for their research, while archivists are more and more turning into bureaucratic institutions.

To sum it up: Archivists have to manage physical space and other resources, while juggling different criteria for preservation (is Document A important to society, to the donating institution, or could it have a specific historical importance?). They can't preserve everything, so a lot is lost. This brings forth a problem for historians, because we simply don't know which documents we'll need to answer future questions. The 'future historicity' of documents is impossible to answer.

As for historians, many, many, many historians are blissfully unaware of archival practice, and assume that archives are doing what they always did. Which they, obviously, don't.