ScienceDaily

Digital objects -- documents, images, databases -- require specific software to open and read them, which in turn requires specific operating systems, device drivers, and hardware to run them depending on the format in which they're stored, whether magnetic, optical or some other system. The pace of change in the world of technology is so rapid that applications as well as media technology have only short life spans and archived data has to be migrated at frequent intervals on to new data carriers and into new file formats to maintain its integrity. For instance, data that once might have been held on magnetic tape or floppy disks is unreadable on today's equipment and CD-ROMs and other media will go the same route in the future.

If the 0s and 1s of digitised information can succumb to the vagaries of technological change, one thing is certain, analogue archives will always be readable to future generations provided they retain language skills. After all, we can read the works of modern authors almost as readily as the words of Shakespeare and Chaucer and ancient hieroglyphics bear close scrutiny once we cracked the code.