1 Some Problems in Research on Stored Information IT case study 1 Report By Johan Dyhrberg and Peter Øhrstrøm Department of Communication Aalborg University During the 1990s electronic communication became a very attractive and commonly used medium for communication between persons and within groups, and it has now clearly become a very important form of communication in modern society. This kind of communication is mainly asynchronous (as in ordinary e-mail), although it may also be synchronous (as in chat rooms). In both cases the communication can be stored and studied for various purposes at a later stage. Actually, many Internet newsgroups are permanently archived in total. This is, for instance how the Internet site Google describes its archive: Google Groups contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981. These discussions cover the full range of human discourse and provide a fascinating look at evolving viewpoints, debate and advice on every subject from politics to technology. Google's search feature enables users to access this wealth of information with the speed and efficiency of a Google web search, providing relevant results from a database containing more than 700 million posts. It is obvious that electronically stored information like the Google Groups can provide valuable material for research of various kinds. This may be linguistic research, social science research, medical research, intercultural studies, research on religious ideas and activities, etc. These kinds of research give rise to important questions, among others, about the special nature of IT communication and the fluid nature of the Internet persona. In addition, this research use of databases created for non-research purposes raises not only problems about the boundary between research and other types of activity, but also interesting questions (which may also be research questions in other fields) about intellectual property, privacy and confidentiality, consent, and data protection. As pointed out in [Gasser et. al. 2004], modern Internet-based research faces an unusual situation as compared with many other kinds of empirical research, for which it is difficult to gather enough empirical data. In many cases, the problem is the opposite in Internet