Everything dies, including information

The experts think it's quite a bit. What we think is permanent isn't. It can take as little as three to five years for a digital storage system to be unreadable. People are trying to copy things over to new formats. There is always something waiting for you. "Our professions and our people often try to extend the normal life span as far as possible through a variety of techniques, but it's still holding back the tide."

A lot of information is complicating things. Storage space was limited and materials were hard to come by. Janes says we have the same problem. All the time, everything is being recorded.

That would correct a historic wrong. Many people didn't have the right culture, gender, or class for their knowledge to be discovered, valued, or preserved for hundreds of years. The challenge of the digital world is unique. According to an estimate last year from the market research firm, the amount of data that companies, governments, and individuals create will double in the next few years.

Some universities are trying to find better ways to save the data. In order to ensure that people in the future can read and use the data from humanities work, the University of Basel's Data and Service Center for Humanities has developed a software platform called Knora. The process is not easy to navigate.

“We can’t save everything ... but that’s no reason to not do what we can.”

Andrea Ogier

There are data sets that are lost because nobody knew they would be useful.

There isn't enough money or people to do all the work that needs to be done. How do we best protect things? Janes says the budget is only so large. In some cases, that means stuff gets saved or stored but just sits there, uncatalogued and unprocessed, and therefore next to impossible to find or access. New collections are often turned away by the archives.

The formats for storing data are permanent. The data was collected during the Apollo era. In the mid-2000s, researchers couldn't find anyone with an IBM 729 Mark 5 machine that could read the tapes. The team was able to locate one at the warehouse of the Australian Computer Museum. The volunteers worked on the machine.

There's a shelf life for software. There was no readily available software that could read the old spreadsheet file that Ogier tried to look at.