For more than two years, Kirsch, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, has been frantically collecting business plans of the dot-com era. To let these documents lie idle and scattered is to risk losing an important piece of American business and cultural history, he argues.

"How will future historians be able to understand the texture of this time? What information will they have access to, to understand the highs and lows?" he asks. "We can't wait 100 years for documents to wend their way into historical archives. We've got to act now."

Kirsch and a rotating staff of loyal students have created a digital database -- available at www.businessplanarchive.org -- that lists more than 2,300 companies so far, mostly from 1997 to 2002.