Long-Term Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage

Much of the new information created today is in digital form and needs to be archived that way. Older information, mostly on paper, is in danger of becoming unreadable – or inaccessible and needs to be converted to digital form. In both cases, it is imperative that the digital files be usable even in a distant future, either because they are relevant to the functioning of a company, organization or country or because they are part of the cultural heritage. The long-term preservation of digital information presents serious challenges of various types. On the technical side, there are two such challenges: the first one is to be able to preserve the bit string containing the information; the second one is to be able to interpret the bits in the future.