CNET News.com

[O]ne preservationist believes the answer might be found in an expression that most curators don’t consider art–online pornography.

“I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it’s a social model that’s working extremely well,” said Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit fostering several digital-works preservation projects. Bollacker spoke Thursday at a symposium called “New Media and Social Memory” at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

He held up the adult industry–always the digital pioneer–as one example of a self-selected community on the Web that swaps images and videos so regularly and widely that that activity will ultimately help preserve an archive over years. Similarly, he pointed to successful niche archives like the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME, a collective of programmers who preserved video games from the 1980s with CPU and hardware emulators.