Reference to the Internet can't be avoided, as so much information is created and spread online. Digital information offers so much more than what offline newspapers or books can represent, reflecting the social phenomena.
But, at the same time, as American inventor Daniel Hills described, people are now living in a "digital dark age" where information comes and disappears quickly without being kept.
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Just as stories from the Three Kingdoms era is a window to people's lives at that time, so Web pages mirror the lifestyle and interests of people in this same era, Min added, and he was disappointed by the fact that neither the government nor the private sector acknowledges the necessity of accumulating Web pages for their records.
"Kim Young-sam was the first president to make a Web site for the presidential office. However, if you want to see one of the Web pages from his time, you can't find it," Min said, saying he himself had tried.
Instead, he could find it on the U.S. International Archive Web page, which means, "There might come a day when we have to pay to see the page that we once created."
The U.S. Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, since its inception in 1996, is a stockpile of Web pages that are both American and non-American.
At the beginning of 2000, Min said he was writing his thesis for a doctorate degree. The subject was an online civil group movement, for which he was monitoring one specific non-government organization's Web site on a daily basis.
"One day, for some reason, the Web page shut itself down, and all the information evaporated," he said, adding how frustrated he became.
Min called for a government-led initiative to preserve Web pages.
Beside the Internet Archive, which is private, the United States has the National Archives and the Library of Congress make extensive digital archives, funded by tax-payers' money. In the private sector, academic institutes and corporations are adding their efforts to preserve Web information.
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