He notes how the U.S. Library of Congress, for example, is charged with archiving a galaxy’s worth of government email correspondence under Access to Information protocols, which steals precious time and budgetary resources from the more culturally crucial forms of archiving.

Then there’s the question of obsolescene in digital formats. Literary manuscripts an author might have conscientiously preserved on floppy discs just a decade or two ago are no longer readable by most modern computers. Archives often maintain an arsenal of old equipment to read older formats, but inevitably these machines will reach a point where they can no longer be maintained. To follow your Russell Smith example, Smith may have carefully preserved all his manuscripts on a contemporary laptop, hard disc, CDR/DVD, etc, but who’s to say a hundred years after Smith’s death these formats will still be accessible?

One thing about paper is that it tends to last centuries, can be easily copied or scanned for safety’s sake, and requires no special equipment to access.

While I’m a big fan of everything digital, and the convenience it brings to research, I also wonder how today’s contemporary authors will stand up to posterity once the stash of typewriter ribbons in their fridge runs out.