1 Preservation of digital literary works: another model of memory?

Digital technology has raised great hopes in the field of heritage preservation. It has appeared as a solution to the problems of media decomposition and content accessibility. Theoretically, digital technology permits perfect reproduction, ubiquity (non competitive access to content), universality (any content can be digitalized) and homogeneity (the life cycle is integrated in an interoperable technical system). But in reality, one has to face issues such as the emergence of new formats and the logical obsolescence of content, the proliferation of transformed copies and complex and heterogeneous reading environments. The archiving and preservation of digital data appear particularly crucial in the field of electronic literature. The preservation of works of electronic literature leads to a real theoretical and practical problem. A digital literary work is indeed not an object, but in most cases it isn’t either a simple event limited in time, like a performance or a digital installation. In fact, it partakes of both aspects: it is a transmittable object but also fundamentally a process that can only exist in an actualisation. Some authors consider that their works – notably online works – are not meant to last forever. They consider that their works bear their own disappearance within themselves. Their labilit