It's surprising, actually, that we have so much documentation of  rugged explorations into frontier lands of the past.  There are some 400 pages of contemporary or near-contemporary documentation associated with deSoto's trek - much of it written on the spot.  One wonders how they kept the ink dry, even.  But there were long days of rest in between marches, and deSoto's sojourn lasted four years.  

By contrast, four years in e-land is goes by in a flash - and may witness six or seven "generations" of software!  It often seems to us that we can scarcely keep up with the changes in our browsers.   

The now-defunct Time Warner i-book site.

I captured the above "ghost" page from a site by Steve Baldwin - a collection of screen shots of vanishing web pages.  Steve informs us on his page, however, that his own job has vanished, and along with it the server access he has enjoyed.  

There have been many similar individual efforts to assemble and preserve Web history so that we can continue to study the evolution of this exotic culture.  And, as with the quickly altering Web landscape, the country of electronic literature has continued to change dramatically over the last ten years.  Right now, we have few plans for maintaining access to this literature.  And, more to the point, we risk losing it altogether if we leave such efforts to the dedication of a single individual.  

Writers, publishers, and librarians will need to seek the assistance of institutions to record the history of and provide access to works of electronic literature going forward.  

Steve Baldwin's Ghostsites <http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/> and the WayBack Machine <http://www.archive.org/>.

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© Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink // The Lore and Lay of E-land // Kessesaw State University, March, 2002