-How does the situation today compare with what happened at the library of Alexandria?
An estimated 44 percent of Web sites that existed in 1998 vanished without a trace within just one year.

-Give a summary of the article and your own feelings as to whether the American government should invest money in this project.
the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt was one of the most devastating losses of knowledge in all of civilization. The digital information that drives our world and powers our economy is in many ways more susceptible to loss than the papyrus and parchment at Alexandria. The challenges underlying digital preservation led Congress in 2000 to appropriate $100 million for the Library of Congress to lead the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, a growing partnership of 67 organizations charged with preserving and making accessible "born digital" information for current and future generations.
In February, Congress passed and the president signed legislation rescinding $47 million of the program's approved funding. This jeopardizes an additional $37 million in matching, non-federal funds that partners would contribute as in-kind donations. the original, raw data from the 1960 Census were stored on a state-of-the-art UNIVAC computer. When the Census Bureau turned the data over to the National Archives in the mid-1970s, UNIVAC computers were long obsolete. Much of the information was eventually recovered, but at a huge cost. Raw data from early satellite probes, including the Viking mission to Mars, pre-1979 Landsat images of Earth and high-resolution images of the moon, have been lost for similar reasons.