It will be interesting to see what the Clinton administration releases with Bush 2 restricting a good bit of documents from the Regan and Bush 1 years citing "security" as a reason.

My father (an historian) is concerned that, with the proliferation of e-mail, historians will lose a valuable source of information: printed correspondence. I'm not convinced that will be the case, but I'm not sure how many people archive e-mail as much as I do (all sent mail, all e-mails to which I respond).

A Steve, you are in the minority and worse its not that emails arent saved (because some groups do archive), its that emails breed a lot of "noise" making the relevant data difficult to find even if you do have a 100GB database full of text email.

You can call me Steve :P I just put A Steve in the comments because it distinguishes me from other Steves and plays off the 'A' in "Aquila."

You're probably right about the lack of archiving, but we can hope, right? And don't knock noise! In 200 years, that stuff's going to be pretty valuable to social historians.

I dont think I want to know what social historians will think when they find centuries old Usenet and IRC logs filled with 1337-speak.

This brings up something I've wondered about for years. Did they ever finally release the missing Gore e-mails? Before the 2000 election, it came out that many Gore e-mails hadn't been turned over in response to a subpeona, supposedly because of a computer error. It was announced that (of course!) the e-mails would be produced, but unfortunately, it would take months and months to dig them all up and we could expect to see them just a few weeks after the Nov. 2000 election. And I haven't been able to find anything on them since. Were they released or buried?

I don't archive my e-mails either. Now you have me thinking!

Ann, as far as the Gore e-mails - I'm sure they are buried somewhere, probably never to be found.