Deep beneath the British Library, Jeremy John, a dandyish forty- something with a floppy sweep of collar-length straw hair, is holding the keys to the digital scriptorium. He unlocks a heavy metal gate, revealing a cramped, chilly white vault furnished only with a standard-issue desk and chair. It would feel as cloistered as a monk's cell if not for the clatter overhead of conveyor belts carrying books to the library's reception. John heads for a reinforced steel shelf and carefully lifts off the dust covers from a line of ancient computers.

Like Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, love-letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Lennon's scrawled first draft of "Ticket to Ride", these superannuated machines, and the equally venerable computer files boxed next to them, are now part of the world's greatest library collection. Digital texts - whether e- mails, research projects or literary drafts - are easy to create and even easier to discard. But as John, the library's first curator of digital manuscripts, is aware, they constitute an increasingly large part of our cultural record - treasures which, if not properly archived, could soon be lost to future generations.