Historians who want to write contemporary history rely on a number of sources. Some of the most important are bureaucracies of nation states which are very good at recording their activity and in most countries are required to archive their papers etc. (from records of parliamentary debates to wellfare etc.); newspapers of the national and local variety; other historians who conduct projects such as interviewing people; the whole of academy such as the social sciences; and right touching on our cut-off date, the internet which can be a hugely interesting source in terms of social history. So there is a variety of sources for contemporary day-to-day events, in your sense most likely some sort of bureaucracy and newspapers.

Although traditional news media, government, academic, corporate, and private archives, and statistics bureaus all remain significant sources for historians researching near-contemporary events - the internet, and by extension digital history projects designed to preserve online information sources - are becoming more and more important.

This is partly the result of online news sites being a more readily available - and often easily searchable - source of information, and their importance has risen since the year 2001 as newspapers, magazines, and other print media have declined for various reasons while online media has grown immensely, both in traditional corporate- and government-driven forms but also in terms of social media and more independent mediums like personal websites, the blog, which first emerged in the late 1990s, and later the vlog.

In addition to giving social, cultural, political, and media historians more diverse literary sources for analysis than any previous period, the internet has also provided governments, corporations, and academics with before unseen levels of statistical data generated from sources like social media (including early instances like newsgroups, forums, and IRC), shopping sites, search engines, etc. As a result of the sheer volume of data open for statistical analysis such analysis has encountered a variety of new problems, and has led to new nomenclature and methods of analysis, curation, etc that reach far beyond that social sciences and have been collectively dubbed 'big data.'

Despite the ready availability of this material it has largely been under-utilized by historians to this point, though one can speculate that this will change as more time elapses since the initial growth of the online community and a more tech-savvy generation of historians takes over. One of the most interesting attempts by historians to utilize online 'big data' to date is the University of Waterloo's Web Archive for Historical Research Group.

I hope I can ask a top-level question that is related. I was of age as the Internet was coming to fruition. If I go back and try to look at things I know I posted, I can't find them any more. Heck, I can't find cool things I saw three years ago even when I know the right keywords to look for.

What are historians thinking about this transition to digital? Paper seems comparatively resilient.