Libraries as museums of print and Electronic Cabinets of Curiosity

From Rayward 1.4 The need for information and Resource Description  

Republic of letters was a 17 and 18 century equivalent of scientific correspondence and blogs. The Republic of letters was replaced by the creation of published scholarly journals. The modern equivalent of these non published and personal correspondence would be personal  emails , email lists, blogs  . In the past these correspondence would be saved by individuals in papers from and were sometimes bequithed to others . However while some may  archive select email correspondence  its security is not as stable as print media especially if it is stored on on web mail . Also print is more stable than electronic files that may become obsolete or corrupted . They also require software and related operating systems to read them. These facilities are know to become superseded and obsolete. What happens to the stuff that gets left behing or is forgotten about becasue it may be deemed to not be of importance at the time.  .....