Now that dot-com mania is dead, historians, researchers, and business analysts are picking at its corpse to figure out just what went wrong. One effort at an autopsy, the Business Plan Archive, is collecting documents from Internet startups and will soon make them available online to help future generations learn from the mistakes.

The project's Web site, www.businessplanarchive .org, is being built and hosted by the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, with help from research firm Webmergers .com. It will let visitors peruse documents from failed and successful dot-coms.

There's been a strong response to the call for documents, says Webmergers president Tim Miller, despite the embarrassing nature of some of the dot-com schemes. "For every person wanting to squirrel away their business plan," he says, "there are 10 others who worked with them who want to make it public."