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Some electronic documents are not intended to be anything other than ephemeral. Weather forecasts, transactional information services, news services, and many other forms of screen-displayed materials, delivered by broadcasting or over physical networks, are intended to have only brief life-spans. Nevertheless, as with printed ephemera, a need may be expressed for the archival retention of some of this material, for the same reasons as printed ephemera may be collected - for social history, or for legal reasons. The problems seem to be those of definition of materials eligible for archival collection, assignation of collection responsibilities, development of monitoring mechanisms to identify collectable materials, and the physical problems of preservation, storage (including indexing) and access. None of these problems is trivial, but that of developing reliable and comprehensive mechanisms to identify collectable items, particularly in a network environment, is probably the most intractable.
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