Sadly not. 18th Century and early 19th Century books will still be around long after most late 19th Century and 20th Century books have collapsed into dust. When publishers made the transition from alkaline rag content paper to acid wood pulp paper for most publications in the late 19th Century to the present 21st Century while extending copyright well beyond a lifetime, much of the last 130 years or so of books and magazines were doomed to slow oxidation into oblivion before they can be lawfully copied without permission of the copyright holder/s. To the extent of which human culture is defined by the transfer of human knowledge from one generation of humanity to the next, current copyright law and practices are destroying major parts of human culture and memory through poor laws and poor archival practices. The Library of Congress is losing books and periodicals from slow oxidation of their acidic paper faster than their images can be archived. Electronic publications such as this blog are ephermeral at best, until and unless they are committed to an archival medium. NASA was criticized during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs for failing to adequately archive its products, but NASA officials at the time pointed the finger of blame back to Congress for not making aequate appropriations of funding for the purpose.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p5.htm
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/section1.htm
http://www.earthrise.org.uk/level%202/level%202a/curving%20horizon.htm

There were several hundred missions of that kind – I wonder how much is left.

I have found what you say to be the case across large swaths of technology. It is not enough to have 100 year media, you must have a 100 year media player to go along with it. We are lucky in a way that our data is straight analog data and NASA has done a pretty remarkable job in preserving much of the paperwork from the Apollo era, though a lot of that effort was due to the people like Nancy Evans in that LA times story that took the personal initiative (Like you did) and did what was necessary to do the preservation. An incredible asset out there is the NASA Technical Reports Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov) with hundreds of thousands of documents from the space age that have been gleaned from libraries around the nation and world and scanned and thus preserved, at least for a while.

One of the things that we are looking to do is find the original first generation Nimbus 1,2, and 3 data tapes that were also recorded on the same Ampex FR-900 that our lunar images were stored on. In another hat tip to Steve, we need as much data, and the best data possible in order to understand our world and provide guidance to the children who are our political leaders, to make the right decisions about what the future may hold.

Twenty years ago when the Washington State subproject of the Civilian Nuclear Waste Repository program was cancelled, the last job I did was to unload the groundwater hydrochemical data from their mainframe-hosted relational databases and write it into a series of reports that went both to paper and to microfiche — in addition to downloading the electronic formats to ASCII flat files. The reports were then distributed to a variety of interested people in various agencies with the objective that somewhere, someplace the information would survive.

The electronic tapes made from the native databases twenty years ago have deteriorated to the point of being unreadable. I’m told that the data was eventually recovered by typing it manually into a modern client server application from the paper reports.