While reading Roy Rosenzweig’s article on preservation  he makes a point of saying that historians used to practice preserving the present for the future as much as studying the past and how it shaped the present. He believes historians, along with archivists, should take a more active role in preserving the present. While I believe historians should certainly be more proactive in preservation by being aware of different mediums and which ones could be best preserved (don’t create a digital historical work using a programming language that isn’t used anymore, for example), I believe that do to the wealth of information being created on a daily basis, the split between archivists and historians should remain. Perhaps an open forum should be created, so that historians can help archivists create catalogs of current works that would be logically accessible to future historians, but I do not believe that the responsibility of preservation rests on historians. Right now, us historians are like a diner in a restaurant, while the archivists are the cooks, and the internet is our server (HAH!). Historians right now need to concern themselves with what they order (do we create such a work in a digital formate? if we do, what format would best accomplish what it is we’re trying to say? Do we add hypertextuality and interactivity, along with photos, videos, and audio clips, or would that be overkill for what our arguments would be?). The archivist takes all the ingredients, mixes them together, and bakes a cake. The hope is that the cake will not just be good enough for us to eat, but for us to serve to any other historians that want to enjoy that cake, at any other point in time. The problem is that the server, the medium through which we access our delicacies, can change. If he changes, will he even understand what a “cake” is? So the problem is that archivist need to make sure they keep all the ingredients to bake a cake, while the server has to be able to recognize what a cake even is! Yet, again, this analogy shows that the historians role in preservation is limited. We need to be aware that we’re the one’s ordering the cake, prescribing what ingredients should be used in it, but we need to trust archivists to always make it the right way, again and again. If we require them to add some especially rare ingredient, eventually they’ll “run out” and the cake will be doomed. I feel like that’s all us historians should be concerned with.