These projects are modest, yet even so are costing millions of dollars each, underwritten by Foundations and the government. Most new information, of the kind that scholars need, is still not available in digital form. It is by no means certain that today's electronic information will still be accessible to scholars in the future. For instance, the tapes of the 1970 U.S. Census are now unreadable by any current technology, and only the printed volumes are accessible. Print and microform are still the only proven, long-term storage technologies.
Libraries acquire and preserve for the future as well as for the present.
To the casual observer, there appears to be an enormous amount of information available without charge on the web. On closer inspection, however, the vast majority of this material is not useful for academic purposes, and that which is useful tends to be expensive. The profit motive and the economics of publishing remain in force in the electronic age. If publishers cannot make a profit out of generating reference books, science journals, or novels, they will simply cease to publish these materials. Moreover, libraries are the only agency in which staff spend a lot of time instructing students in how to find and use both traditional and electronic information, and how to distinguish that which is trustworthy from the sea of flotsam which is not.