blog: data ticking time bomb
Archivist, librarians and others concerned with the preservation of digital objects have been aware of problems such as proprietary file formats or accessing data on old data storage mediums for a long time. As a recent BBC News article shows, digital preservation is now a mainstream media issue. This is partly for economic reasons, as
Europe loses 3bn euros each year in business value because of issues around digital preservation.
As mentioned in the article, preservation of digital resources as seen from the point of view of a national archive or library means being able to convert hundreds of thousands of documents in one go. In the field of digital arts and humanities we might not (yet) have to deal with that many digital resources, but then of course many of our digital objects are much more complicated than you average MS Word file - preservation has to be build in from the start of a project, otherwise it will create problems down the track.
In 2006, a Methods Network expert seminar on sustainability discusses these and related issues. Read the sustainability report on our website.
