Worrying about this is not the central concern of my life. But it is
important to consider both directions in which we could lose the ability to
access information that requires machinery to make it human-readable--
technological progress or regression. Especially over the centuries-long
time frame archivists need to consider.
We need to make the attempt to keep the information available in its
original format (or a format updated to the technology of the moment), but
also to preserve the information (or a description of it) in a form we know
can last the ages.
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