It has become a commonplace to declare that we are living through one of the great epochs of human discovery. “The digital revolution.” The Internet as a “fundamental and extensive force of change.” With the advent of the Internet as a mode of communication and information discovery, we are leading lives, and facing challenges undreamed of in previous generations except as the stuff of science fiction. But what if it’s actually true? What if we are living through a period as significant as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment? What if our current circumstances are comparable to the Depression? Or the Post–war era? How about the counter–culture revolution of the 60s? Each of these eras, great and small, are marked, not only by their social upheavals, but also by their great strides in artistic representation. The Renaissance had Michelangelo and Leonardo; the Enlightenment had David and Ingres. In the modern era, we have Frank Lloyd Wright, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, le Corbusier, Picasso, Matisse, and the list goes on and on. Great artists, whose work helps us make sense of the past. Of course, we also have meaningful contemporary art—but there’s a problem. Whereas we can still look at Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures, and in many cases, can look at preliminary studies and drawings—we’re running the risk of loosing contemporary art as soon as ten years after its creation The new media art community has recently come to the realization that the objects and ideas of their most compelling thinkers and artists run the risk of disappearing forever, because these objects are often in digital or other variable formats, which tend to rapidly become, at best, inaccessible; and at worst, irretrievably lost. Unless there is a systematic and persistent exploration of preservation and archival procedures for these significant cultural objects, they will, in all likelihood, not be accessible for future generations of artists, scholars, or the general public. One of the new media community’s most important advances towards this goal of systematic investigation is the development of the “Archiving the Avant-Garde” project, which brings together new media venues, curators, and artists to devise possible solutions to this very difficult problem of the disappearing objects of the avant-garde. There are three distinct challenges that the new media art community has to confront. They must first assess the nature and goals of new media art in general. It’s very difficult to preserve a nebulous “something,” especially if that “something” is a complex series of digital objects with variable and intricate relationships between parts and the whole, which also happens to comment and feed off of a culture in which the conservator is currently living. Unless the preserving agency has a convincing vision of what is intrinsically important to maintain, the resulting objects run the risk of being inauthentic and/or presenting an inaccurate indication of the artist’s intentions. It would also be prudent for this community to consider the current state of art conservation and preservation in related fields. It’s important to recognize the challenges and philosophical conflicts that art conservators of the last half century have faced. No matter how cutting edge and exciting these new media artifacts are, they are not being created in a vacuum, and conservators have faced similar (although not digital) problems for hundreds of years. I will specifically review methods of traditional art conservation, and how those professionals are dealing with less stable forms like conceptual and performance art. Finally, the community should recognize and reflect on the history of access and preservation from an archival point of view. The project is, after all, called “Archiving the Avant-Garde,” and there are some common tropes and methods within the archival community, particularly the ideas of diplomatics and intrinsic value, for example, that the new media art community might find helpful. Information technology professionals and humanist scholars have a responsibility to keep the past alive. The information scientists provide the infrastructure and methodologies, and the humanists provide the interpretive structure and deep understanding from which future generations will gain insight into our collective consciousness. Unless we begin working together, building systems that grow naturally out of the scholarly tradition, rather than expecting the scholarly tradition to twist itself into knots trying to fit within the current Information Infrastructure, we will never be able to transcend the prosaic world of subject headings and metadata elements. Information artists and the new media art organizations are accomplishing, in the work itself, this very feat of bringing together traditional forms of expression with new technologies. We should take a lesson from them. We need to find a way to save and preserve the richness of this experience for future generations.