Since the late twentieth-century, the popularity and prevalence of digital formats have presented challenges for two groups closely associated with archives: archivists and historians. If archivists cannot fulfill their mandate to preserve our growing digital documentary heritage in the face of rapid technological change, the historians who are one of the core user groups of these records will have very little material with which to reconstruct and analyze the late-twentieth and

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... st centuries. This article explores the benefits and challenges that digitization and digital preservation have brought to archivists, as well as the repercussions of these developments for historians. Although the challenges are significant, there is reason to be optimistic: new archival approaches and technologies are being developed every year, and historians have a tradition of making the most of whatever archivists can preserve.