Digital Preservation

"Technology has so altered our world that most of what we now create begins life in a digital format. The artifacts that tell the stories of our lives no longer reside in a trunk in the attic, but on personal computers or Web sites, in e-mails or on digital photo and film cards. The flip side to the ease with which we are able to create digital content is the complexity of preservation and long-term retrieval of this content. We must contend with issues relating to hardware and software compatibility; long-term storage; organization of files for ease of search and retrieval; media quality; disaster recovery; and integrity of original data."

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/

As Go Document Formats, So Goes Video

"To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable."

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20071223055232858