For those interested in information preservation.
This article brings it home how fragile our information age is.
"But Ms Ceeney said some digital documents held by the National Archives had already been lost forever because the programs which could read them no longer existed.
"We are starting to find an awful lot of cases of what has been lost. What we have got to make sure is that it doesn't get any worse."
The root cause of the problem is the range of propriatorial file formats which proliferated during the early digital revolution.
Technology companies, such as Microsoft, used file formats which were not only incompatible with pieces of software from rival firms, but also between different iterations of the same program."
Pretty frightening really when you think about how fast and obsolete programs become or fail to thrive commercially.
"But Ms Ceeney said some digital documents held by the National Archives had already been lost forever because the programs which could read them no longer existed.
"We are starting to find an awful lot of cases of what has been lost. What we have got to make sure is that it doesn't get any worse."
The root cause of the problem is the range of propriatorial file formats which proliferated during the early digital revolution.
Technology companies, such as Microsoft, used file formats which were not only incompatible with pieces of software from rival firms, but also between different iterations of the same program."
Pretty frightening really when you think about how fast and obsolete programs become or fail to thrive commercially.