Digital obsolescence

Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because of its archaic format: the physical media, the reader (required to read the media), the hardware, or the software that runs on it is no longer available.

A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project from the 1980s, although its data was eventually recovered after a significant amount of effort. Cornell University Library’s digital preservation tutorial (now hosted by ICPSR) has a timeline of obsolete media formats, called the “Chamber of Horrors”, that shows how rapidly new technologies are created and cast aside.

The rapid evolution and proliferation of different kinds of computer hardware, modes of digital encoding, operating systems and general or specialized software ensures that digital obsolescence will become a problem in the future. Many versions of word-processing programs, data-storage media, standards for encoding images and films are considered "standards" for some time, but in the end are always replaced by new versions of the software or completely new hardware. Files meant to be read or edited with a certain program (for example Microsoft Word) will be unreadable in other programs, and as operating systems and hardware move on, even old versions of programs developed by the same company become impossible to use on the new platform (for instance, older versions of Microsoft Works, before Works 4.5, cannot be run under Windows 2000 or later).

Early attention was brought to the challenges of preserving machine-readable data by the work of Charles M Dollar in the 1970s, but it was only during the 1990s that libraries and archives came to appreciate the significance of the problem and has been discussed among professionals in those branches, though so far without any obvious solutions other than continual forward-migration of files and information to the latest data-storage standards. File formats should be widespread, backward compatible, often upgraded, and, ideally, open format. In 2002, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage cited the following as “de facto” formats that are unlikely to be rendered obsolete in the near future: uncompressed TIFF and ASCII and RTF (for text).

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